Category Archives: Five Mice

March 12, 2015 · 11:01 am

RADIANT VERMIN, Soho Theatre W1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI IS CHARMED TWICE OVER

Miss Dee arrives. She’s from the newly-created DSRCDH: “Department for Social Regeneration through the Creation of Dream Homes.” She makes Ollie and Jill an offer which is surely too good to be true: Miss Dee explains it’s a government project inspired by the Amazon jungle plant, “The Shimmering Glimmering Tree”, which looks drab until you polish one berry, at which point, all the berries begin to shine until “the whole tree sparkled like treasure.” To have a free house, all the Swifts have to do is do it up: Jill has excellent taste, Miss Dee notes, and Ollie is a dab hand at DIY.

The dream home in question is a shell: it needs rewiring, has no hot water, and is in a deserted suburban development mainly inhabited by wandering tramps. But Jill and Ollie, with a baby on the way, take the chance. They do renovate the property, to their own astonishment, in a macabre and surreal method in which Ridley’s dark humour begins to wax lyrical. And, sure enough, Gilead Close begins to sparkle as predicted, with aspirational neighbours moving in to take advantage of the property boom, culminating in a shiny new shopping centre round the corner, offering “The Never Enough Shopping Experience: because enough is never enough.”

Radiant Vermin has two strengths. One is its macabre twist, which I won’t spoil for you: but just watch Ridley’s twist grow, strengthen and become ever more prominent, with the characters’ actions becoming ever more hysterical and desperate. While maintaining a tone of cheerful surrealism, Ridley slides in questions about religious hypocrisy, our attitude to the homeless, consumerist greed and neighbourly one-upmanship. You are swept up into the joke: but afterwards, walking away through the streets of Soho with beggars on every side, I felt a kind of horror at the hilarity which only applies to the very best of black humour. You almost can’t believe you laughed at it, but you did.

The second strength is the sheer talent on stage, directed by David Mercatali. Sean Michael Verey begins Ollie as a quiet, ordinary bloke, but steadily builds him into an extraordinarily brilliant character performance, including two hilarious one-man fight scenes, in which he fights his invisible assailant while commentating on and explaining each punch in real time, causing the audience to collapse with laughter. The speed of Ridley’s writing, and Verey’s natural comic instincts, seem made for each other. Gemma Whelan is wonderful as his socially-upward wife Jill, a nice girl who likes to get her own way, cheerfully sacrificing her morals until guilt begins to eat away at her. The play builds to an insane crescendo in the fabulous “Party from hell” scene, which has Whelan and Verey playing no fewer than eight different characters, all with scrupulously distinctive accents, body language and gestures, in bewilderingly rapid exchanges, reducing the audience to helpless, uproarious laughter. Amanda Daniels is bewitching and unsettling as Miss Dee, the devilish Fairy Godmother figure, and heartbreaking as the shattered vagrant Kay.

– Charlotte Valori

Box office: http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/radiant-vermin/, 020 7478 0100, until 12 April

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on RADIANT VERMIN, Soho Theatre W1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 22, 2015 · 9:16 pm

FARINELLI AND THE KING Sam Wanamaker playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe

MONARCHY, MADNESS, MUSIC

Philip of Spain, grandson of Louise XIV and captive of 18c monarchic rigidity, is lying on his bed , fishing in a goldfish-bowl and announcing that it is all a dream. When his anxious queen Isabella (Melody Grove, moving both in affection and despair) coaxes him, he petulantly addresses the goldfish and throws the water at her candle shouting “Fire!”. Wilful eccentricity: petulant, childish denial. This is not the manically humble derangement of the last stage mad-king, Alan Bennett’s George III. For Philip, as the singer Farinelli later says “His madness was a kind of sorrow”.

To be credible, even lovable while portraying self-destructive depression shading to violence you need a special actor. Clare van Kampen has – for this her first play – the very special Mark Rylance. His strange openness and mournful mischief are familiar as Thomas Cromwell on TV, but onstage he is an even stranger marvel: hardly acting, rather seeming to endure some profound, cost-bearing inner event in each performance and not minding that we watch. He seems half-clown half-angel, those comic slanted eyebrows over a face oversensitive, visionary, quivering with the griefs of eternity and the music of the spheres.

Well, it gets you writing like that. Sorry. This extraordinary, heart-shivering two-hour adventure in the little Jacobean playhouse combines three of the most powerful emotional triggers in theatre: candlelight, Rylance, and Handel arias sung by Iestyn Davies. It is the trues story of King Philip’s depression, and how the only thing which made him almost sane was the voice of the great castrato singer, who in the manner of the day was brutally unmanned at ten years old to retain a “birdlike, unimaginable” high voice (here Davies’ unearthly flutelike counter-tenor).

We hear the same arias Philip would have known, and Van Kampen’s script and John Dove’s direction place them with the care of a master-jeweller setting fine stones. Each ones feels both necessary and astonishing, as it did to Philip himself. Sam Crane plays Farinelli; Davies appears alongside, in identical clothes, to sing. That could be distracting: but in evvect the subtle body language between the two men conveys another emotional message of the play – that great artists sometimes feel in awe of their own talent, afraid that like a magical pet it might desert them. In the final moment, in the singer’s old age, his avatar is not dressed like him, but in the bright brocade of his youth. Leaving, the tenor leaves puts a pitying, loving hand on the reclusive old man’s shoulder.

Beyond the intensely redemptive moments of song, it is a play painfully perceptive about depression : Philip’s initial “I lack for what I need. There is no song here” makes Isabella go to Vienna to recruit the singer. As he becomes more himself, he bossily decamps with wife and Farinelli to a forest to harmonize with the stars, the “ music of the spheres” . And when Farinelli tries to escape this captivity, he turns on his wife with shocking brutality and deploys a combination of threat and sulk and needy paranoia utterly authentic for anyone dealing with a half-cured serious depressive. “I don’t love you” he snarls at Farinelli “I just need you to sing”.

Have I conveyed the fact that it is often funny? Maybe not. But the courtier (Edward Peel ) frustrated by the King’s ineffectiveness, and the singer’s agent (Colin Hurley) have great moments . And van Kampen – like April de Angelis in FANNY HILL at Bristol last week – has a sly knack of keeping it credible yet throwing in moments of modern slang to prevent any sense of wearying 18c pastiche.

box office 020 7902 1400 to 7 march
rating five
5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on FARINELLI AND THE KING Sam Wanamaker playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 2, 2015 · 11:55 pm

ANYTHING GOES New Wimbledon theatre SW19 and touring


A SHIPLOAD OF DELIGHT

What can I say? Daniel Evans’ production is delicious, it’s de-lovely, a de-lirious succession of treats. There is always a fizzing joyful absurdity about Cole Porter’s 1934 shipboard musical – its book largely by P.G. Wodehouse, no less – and Evans and Sheffield Theatres have done it more than justice.

Not one minute passes without something visually or comically fabulous. Often, in even the best musicals, there is a scene or a number where you lose focus for a moment and think “Oh right, we’ll just get through this…”. But this screwball romance of gangways and gangsters, stowaways and star- crossed lovers and high-kicks hits you with one gleeful surprise after another. We may know three-quarters of the numbers too well, but they come up fresh as daisies. Sight gags are plentiful and brilliant (who does not find their life enhanced by watching a panicked gangster shove a Pekinese down his trousers?). As for the spoken wisecracks, a good few of them had the audience actually shrieking (“Iiquor has never touched my lips!””You know a short cut?”).

Actually, even the line “I never knew you were Chinese” just about finished off half my row. As did Erma’s announcement that she had sailors waiting for her in the “fuc’s’le”. Spoken with just enough ambiguity to keep it a family show while causing adults to choke happily on their Maltesers.

But a great deal of the wit is just where it should be: in Alistair David’s choreography and Nigel Lilley’s sharp, startling, diverse musical arrangement. Every number is meticulously acted as well as danced: in one striking moment Hope and Billy’s sentimental duet “De-lovely” is suddenly surrounded by a crazy ballet in 30’s swimwear (the costumes are wonderful), and as the cast surge and sway around them the central pair manage to look – as you would – baffled by it. Even funnier – achingly so – is the ensemble of sailors singing about girls ashore, in a dance so camply precise, so tight-white-trouseredly effete, that it is clear they really needn’t bother to wait for the lasses ashore. As for “Blow , Gabriel blow!” Reno’s revival meeting moves from jazz-dance to clapping, leaping, tapping, Bob-Fosse-style doll-like jerking, finally to very sexy lapdancing and a crashing finale fit to blow the roof off.

If the production itself is the star, that is not to denigrate the players. Debbie Kurup has a gamine elegance and growing vigour as Reno, Matt Rawle dead-on light-comedy timing as Billy, and Hugh Sachs’ portly Moonface blissfully takes the angst out of gangster with that glorious Bluebird song. Tweet-tweet. Indeed one of the pleasures of the show is that all the principals get a hell of a number all to themselves (not least Stephen Matthews doing his gypsy number in sock-suspenders, and Alex Young relishing Buddie Beware).

But enough of this. I”m distracting you from buying a ticket. Let me just add that what Sheffield has done is to unleash on a national provincial tour a really big show: elegantly set, wittier and better than many in the West end (it beats the 2002 Trevor Nunn revival for inventiveness and vigour). And crowds will see this glorious excellence at far below West End prices. I call that a result.

box office 0844 871 7646 to 7 Feb
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/new-wimbledon-theatre

touring on to 10 October nationwide – Aylesbury next, then Stoke….

rating five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ANYTHING GOES New Wimbledon theatre SW19 and touring

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

January 30, 2015 · 10:04 am

MY NIGHT WITH REG Apollo, WC1

REMEMBERING REG…A REVIEW WORTH A  REMIX

 

 
Thought I should see how it feels in a bigger theatre, after writing at the Donmar that Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play is “pretty much perfect: a twist on the traditional drawing-room, single-set comedy of sex, love, friendship and death. Directing, Robert Hastie does it full justice. In two unbroken hours here is a constantly involving, slyly funny and heartbreaking production”.

I agree with myself. Its five stars still shine bright, and it is a joy to see it again – with a remarkably warm affectionate house, too, more loud uninhibited laughs and “aaahs” of pity for poor lovelorn Guy than on the press night.

 

 
The audience at a matinee was gratifyingly mixed, uncultish. Although it is famously a play about a group of gay men and the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, it doesn’t bother with the familiar ideas on that subject: social prejudice, angsty gay identity, all that. Elyot – though the times were tricky – is not demanding gay rights, but demonstrating through the lovability of the characters that they are just like any other men. Blokey, comradely, puzzled by the conflict between liberated desire and the deeper hunger for intimacy and fidelity. . For all their campery they are just six people in a tangle of affections. Even the weariness of long partnerships is deliciously acknowledged in Benny the bus-driver’s observation that he only notices what a bore his lover is when they’re in company.

 

 
There are of course differences. In a gay play – certainly at that period – you can complicate your sexual relationships faster than Feydeau. And the wit is more uninhibited , more locker-room than in almost any straight love-tangle play: satiric, savage and explicit and often painfully funny. But there is always a recognizable current of deep feeling, and the subtlety of it endures and grows.

 

 
So to return to my Donmar review, “It is not a play of stereotypes and special pleading. It drills into universals: the uses and limits of sex, the blind alley and brief relief of hookups, the yearning for intimacy, the ache of jealousy, Auden’s “grave evening demand for love” . At its heart is a superb performance by Jonathan Broadbent as Guy: tubby, fussy, decent, maternal, frustrated, everybody’s confidant and nobody’s first choice, achingly funny and heartbreakingly noble. Julian Ovenden and Geoffrey Streatfield are the glamour-boys whose conquistador pride crumbles into grief and longing; Lewis Reeves the barman, wisest of them all. Outside that circle – though nobody escapes Reg – Richard Cant is funny and sad as Bernie, sinuously lovesick for his nonchalant brutal bus-driver Benny (Matt Bardock, cocksure in every sense).”

 

I stand by every word and every starry mouse…
Box Office 0844 871 7624 to Supported: Barclays /Simmons & Simmons
Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MY NIGHT WITH REG Apollo, WC1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

January 26, 2015 · 11:46 pm

TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

A TERROR AND A TRIBUTE 

 
“May the Master of Mercy shelter them in the shadow of his wings”. A Holocaust prayer is on a slip in the programme for this eve of the Auschwitz liberation, and quiet music plays after the curtain-call for those leaving bereft of speech. Jonathan Church’s powerful, intelligent Chichester production grows in status in the big space, and that it should be played with quiet brilliance so close to Whitehall and Westminster is stirringly appropriate.

 
For Mark Hayhurst’s play deals with five years from 1933-1938: before the war, while official Britain was still trying to hope that Herr Hitler was, well, sort of OK. It relates the fate of Hans Litten, a combative lawyer who in 1931 had called the Nazi party leader as a witness in the trial of some brownshirt thugs, and in cross-examination humiliated him. Hitler, still at his bierhalle-rant stage, was no match for the angry young advocate. A Jew, too: having converted in defiance of his cautious father (born Jewish, but Lutheranizing himself to keep his job) . His mother Irmgard defended his independence. And when he was arrested the night of the Reichstag fire, Irmgard became his champion, her fight the theme of this play.

 
It could be tragic-heroic, a harrowing reiteration of what we all know about the brutalities of Nazism. It is both, but also a play of ideas and discomforting truths, both warning and beacon. Penelope Wilton is Irmgard, in a performance so controlled, impassioned, ironic, subtle and perfectly pitched that several of us left the theatre muttering “Why is she not a Dame yet?” . We meet her as an elegant Prussian matron, confident of her status, resolved to be “patient and objectionable” with the Gestapo officials to get Hans released from what, weasellingly, is called “protective custody” against the passionate people of the New Germany. “We are looking after him” says Dr Conrad, the official played with wonderful civil suaveness by John Light.

 

 

His encounters with Irmgard recur through the play: she in command of facts, once horrifyingly listing her son’s known (leaked) injuries. But she plays the game, makes Heil-Hitler concessions; he seems to offer hope, even respect, till the gloves come off and layers of class resentment and fanatical belief make him suddenly venomous. Light does it superbly, chillingly, demonstrating that the veneer of Western European civilization can be very thin indeed.

 

 

The city scenes are on a bare forestage, but artfully convey through the curve of a desk-leg or descent of a chandelier a bourgeois Gerrmanic correctness I recognize from life there. Behind them, concrete and bars give us the cells and concentration-camps where Martin Hutson’s Litten is tormented. And core to the impact of the play is that we see him with fellow-prisoners: the ironic newspaper editor Ossietsky and the wild-man satirist and poet Erich Muhsam. For all their bruises they joke: darkly mock their situation, to bring home the vital truth that such victims were intellectuals, sophisticates, wits: the brightest. And that their tormentors were envious stupid thugs or at best dupes.

 

 

 

The same withering humorous intelligence sparks from Irmgard: she is often, for all her maternal torment, very funny. Nobody can wither like Wilton, for all her kindly grace. There is a scene with Lord Allan – the British envoy on whom her hopes are pinned – where he havers in diplomatic language that Hitler is partly a victim of “mistranslation” and that Anglo-German relations come first. Set against the viciousness behind, that throws a timely parallel with today’s emollient attitudes to Saudi Arabia. Where , remember, a dissident blogger is being imprisoned and tortured while we fly flags at half-mast for the royal autocrats.

 

 

The subject could be unwatchably grim, but the play is not, because its intellectual sinewiness and redemptive spirit shine too bright. At last mother and doomed son meet, and quote Rilke about confronting dragons with courage. “That’s beautiful” says Hans. “I wish it were true” mourns the mother. And he replies “It can’t be one and not the other. You taught me that”. So yes, beautiful.

 
Box office 0845 481 1870 http://www.trh.co.uk to 14 march

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as ,

January 23, 2015 · 12:55 am

OPPENHEIMER Swan , Stratford-upon-Avon

THE BIRTH OF THE BOMB

 

 

This is what the RSC is for. Not mere Bardolatry, but to bring new work illuminated by the craft, humanity and wisdom which comes to those steeped in Shakespeare. We have felt heart-jerking moments in this theatre, when past crises are shaken into present life: Written on the Heart, Wolf Hall, The Orphan of Zhao, A Soldier in Every Son, The Heresy of Love. But rarely has it struck home as hard as in Tom Morton-Smith’s stunning presentation of J.Robert Oppenheimer , leader of the “Manhattan Project” which in 1945 gave birth to the Bomb and death to millions.

 
Steeped in irony and sincerity, it is a thing of tremendous speeches, dazzling metaphor and heartfelt engagement. It is directed, fast and featly, by Angus Jackson in a bare space beneath great girders: the floor is a vast blackboard on which formulae are scribbled in manic creativity or appear lit suddenly from above; it conjures classrooms, the secret desert lab city of Los Alamos, domestic interiors, and finally the fearful inevitability when formulae became solid, incredible bombs.

 

 

Oppenheimer is John Heffernan in the performance of his career: riveting, truthful, complex, sinking deep into himself or flashing sudden charm. Here’s a brilliant physicist forced by circumstance and ambition to becomes a leader in the technical war, a “a skinny intellectual elitist New York Jew with chest problems and sciatica” happily surrounded by communist party friends passionately fundraising against Fascism in 1930’s Spain. Then a man forced to step aside from “doobious associates” , shadowed by the FBI, too vital to sack but never trusted; the reader of Hindu scriptures who finally describes himself with loathing “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. Skinny, pale, steely, decent, conflicted, aware of having “left a loaded gun in a playground” for political thugs, real tears touch his face in the final scenes.

 

 

They touch ours too. The last sections are stunning, not least when the new-fledged bomb is dispatched, the pilot briefed, and from its casing a small boy rises and – with studied dispassionate care – explains its effects.

 

 
Despite the fascination of Heffernan himself, the ensemble is core to the play’s strength. Fellow-scientists explain and scribble and offer glorious metaphors of the power of the split atom – “a cloud of tethered energy…a pack of wolves in a broom-cupboard”. They emerge as distinct characters: Jamie Wilkes the bespectacled keen Serber, heading out for Japan with his pet bomb horribly named Little Boy “to hold his hand, see him off”. He cracks later into realization. OR the Europeans Lomanitz, Bethe and Teller, the latter petulantly outraged at the loss of scientific “beauty and elegance” in the dormitory life and dull graft of getting the first-generation bomb ready before Hitler could get his.

 

 
There is genuine, inescapable comedy in the human interactions, not least the sometimes tense, sometimes ludicrous relationships with the military overseers. William Gaminara gives General Groves a dignified pragmatism but Andrew Langtree demonstrates a lovely, crewcut Captain’s indignation at the tieless unpolished scientists who dare to perch on his desk while talking to him. In Oppenheimer’s agonized withdrawal after Nagasaki, though, it is Groves who urges the scientist’s wife to remember the point of uniform: ““It helps to make that distinction between an act of war and an act of….the burden is not his alone and never will be”. The women too – Catherine Steadman as the lively, idealistic, doomed first lover and Thomasin Rand as Oppie’s wife Kitty – are pivotal in the hero’s emotional story . They also – with Laura Cubitt and Sandy Foster – subtly remind us that even within the laboratory fastness of Los Alamos this was civilian 1940’s America: its own life not threatened, the complexities of distant Europe a matter for argument not terror.

 
A stunning play, tribute and warning about the “ambivalence – pride and horror” of harnessing the atom, bringing a star’s violent energy to the earth’s surface. As Frank Oppenheimer heard his brother mutter it the desert test “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart”.

Superb , serious, humane, riveting, honourable. It must have an afterlife.
box office 0844 800 1110 to 7 March.

RATING  five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on OPPENHEIMER Swan , Stratford-upon-Avon

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

January 16, 2015 · 11:08 am

THE RAILWAY CHILDREN King’s Cross Station theatre N1

IN WHICH YOUR REVIEWER CRACKS UP ENTIRELY

 

 

Tears are strange. They can fill the eye when witnessing not horror or sadness, but a sudden kindness. It is a kind of happy sorrow: maybe a recognition of our own desolate inner yearning for a kind word. However it is, Mike Kenny’s marvellous adaptation of E.Nesbit’s book brings it on more than once. And since steam-engines themselves nearly always make me gulp – so noble, so shining, so faithful, so lovingly tended – the real one in the show pretty well wiped me out. Twice.

 

 

It was one of the first plays I reviewed for the Times, nearly five years ago when it came from the National Railway Museum at York to the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo. Now it has a bigger cast of extras and an equally wonderful set: audience on platforms either side of real rails, over which simple wooden stages glide the changing scenes to and fro without fuss. Props (apart from the locomotive) are simple enough to inform children, as all good children’s theatre should, that they can go home and recreate it in play. That first time I took a 9-year-old, and despite having never read the book or seen the film, he absolutely got it.

 
Indeed the memory of the film, good as it was, fades very rapidly because this is a real piece of theatre, faithful to the quirky, inventive, principled early socialist Nesbit and her respectful understanding of children. The three are remembering the summer in Yorkshire: now young adults, aware of why their father was taken away. They narrate in memory, slipping easily in and out of time with uncomplicated clarity. Serena Manteghi is an authoritative Roberta, catching perfectly the age of transition: half child, half questioning adolescent worried about her mother and discovering the horror of her father’s disgrace. Jack Hardwick is a nicely pompous Peter (Nesbit had boys bang to rights!), Louise Calf the cheerful, blurting youngest. Children will recognize the types immediately.

 

 

But Damian Cruden’s production is fully satisfying for adult audiences. Because it’s often funny, but also because of its faithfulness to the 1906 setting, evoking the class awkwardness of a family come down in the world, the mother – Caroline Harker again, sternly warm – hiding the truth from her children, and the bluff kindness and bridling offence at “charity” of stationmaster Perks, a gorgeously Yorkshire Jeremy Swift . The arrival of the penniless Russian exile Schepansky is wonderfully handled, the children’s curiosity and the mother’s grief for “all prisoners and captives” in counterpoint. And of course there are the dramas on the railway line, the red petticoat, all that. And OK, some of us do cracking up with emotion when the great green locomotive (LSWR Adam T3 class No. 563) puffs in for the first time and hisses to a lifesaving halt.

 
But the delight of this production is that it doesn’t depend entirely on that – er – star vehicle. Earlier in the show, tremendous sound effects and great clouds of steam evoke it, and so does the children’s wonder. The father disappears into steam, in poignant silhouette between a top-hat and a policeman’s helmet; he reappears from it at last to that famous cry of “Oh, my Daddy!”. Steam! Love! Redemption! All those Brief Encounter emotions rise, and you may well need a bun in the artfully recreated Refreshment Room foyer to get over it. Actually, my daughter went straight home and “made an emergency apple pie” .

 

 

box office 0844 871 7604 http://www.railwaychildrenlondon.com to 1 March

 

Rating Five    5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE RAILWAY CHILDREN King’s Cross Station theatre N1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

December 16, 2014 · 11:39 pm

CITY OF ANGELS Donmar, WC1

 

Shabba-dabba-doo-wop! What a glorious evening. Grownup, dryly hilarious, sublimely jazzy. Josie Rourke’s Donmar walks away with the palm for the season’s top show. Or perhaps sashays away, tossing platinum curls and white mink. Or gumshoes down the mean streets of Seven Dials on the trail of dodgy dames, tipping its hat-brim bitterly over its eyes…

 
For this is the dark 1940’s glamour of Raymond Chandler and Spillane, of private ‘tecs with complicated histories, and blondes who turn up in their grimy offices and are clearly “a handful – maybe two if you played your cards right”. Better, we are watching that literary world intersecting disastrously with Hollywood as the novelist Stine (Hadley Fraser) sees his creation Stone (Tam Mutu) and assorted tricky blondes, pinstriped heavies and bitter Latino rivals traduced into a formulaic film-noir. The appropriately named studio boss Buddy Fidler (Peter Polycarpou, manically perfect). knows that movies have different priorities “They’re light and dark, they’re faces ten feet high..I’ve been through de Mille, I know!”. Rosalie Craig, smart as a whip, plays Stine’s wife, editor and literary conscience: her number “It needs work” probably had every writer (and adulterer) in the audience wincing.

 
Larry Gelbart’s ironic story of artistic differences meshes perfectly with Cy Coleman’s trad jazz score (under Gareth Valentine). Rebecca Trehearn, as both Buddy’s real assistant and the fictional detective’s secretary, knocks the roof off with the sour elegant wit of “You can always count on me” , and Stine and Stone’s ferocious duets are breathtaking. Such big numbers could be showstopping, but with David Zippel’s lyrics are always intelligent, part of the story. And you have to love a man who rhymes “If you’re not celibate, we could raise hell a bit”.

 

 

It’s a handful to stage, as the two plots are kept distinct – real life in garish technicolour and the noir plot in monochrome – while sharing the same stage, mirroring and interfering with one another. There’s some brilliant jerky backwards-work from the characters in the plot when the author, typing overhead, has to cross out dialogue. But Rourke powers through it with panache, thanks to Robert Jones’ brilliant two-tier design, pinpoint lighting work from Howard Harrison, and some ferocious choreography from Stephen Mear . The backdrop is an immense wall of scripts and film canisters on which typed words flit around and witty visual shocks occur. When Hadley Fraser leaps onto an invisible box it is lit -at the second he lands – to become a pile of paper,. When he and his creation fight – Tam Mutu radiating irresistible Clooneyesque glamour as the imaginary detective – it is spectacular. The costumes and manner are fabulously parodic too: when the foxy Mallory (Samantha Barks) leaps on the hero with a Hitchcock-blonde toss of the hair, there are real dark roots on the platinum. It’s details like that you worship.

 

 

And the wisecracks! Gelbart, writing in the 80s, lovingly reproduces the tone and rhythm of a Chandler. “My husband” smoulders Katherine Kelly as the wicked blonde, “is a good deal older than me”. “How good a deal?” asks Stone, deadpan. Must remember to use that one. The millionaire husband is in an iron lung: a retro device wheeled on and off to general glee, getting its best moment right at the end. And I haven’t even mentioned the the wicked stab at Hollywood’s social censorship. Or the castanet-playing corpse.

 
Box Office 0844 871 7624 to 15 Feb.
Supported: Barclays /H & S Williams Foundation for the ARts / Ray Bar-Salisbury

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

and  design mouse, with extra respect:  Set Design Mouse resized

 

Comments Off on CITY OF ANGELS Donmar, WC1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

December 12, 2014 · 10:42 pm

GOLEM Young Vic SE1

ANIMATED, ANIMATING, ADMIRABLE, ADORABLE   

 

 

Let’s be honest. It’s nearly Christmas. You could flinch at the thought of staggering in after a day of guilty shopping to face a show – fresh from the Salzburg Festival, based on Jewish and Czech folklore as satirically used in a 1914 novel by Gustav Meyrink – excoriating a “politically impotent generation” in an industrialized 21c democracy hooked on the “heroin of market-driven popular culture”. Especially when you hear that it will be interpreted through movement, cutting-edge sychronized animation and free verse. You might opt for something jollier.
You’d be wrong. Rush for a ticket. For this is the latest piece of brilliance from 1927, who swept the board with their “The Animals and Children Took To The Streets” a few years back. And it has more real, guffawing laughs than most pantos, a sharper topical bite than any news-quiz, more humane and delightedly intelligent thought behind it than most media. There is immense (if rueful) delight in having our comfy delusions slapped about by a faux-naif mythic cautionary tale. Especially right now when we are all just awakening, blinking vaguely, to the way that information technology and network owners are manipulating us – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tinder, cookies, a thousand apps and platforms seem to obey but control our very desires.

 
That is what the story, elegantly told in 90 minutes, is all about. A Golem is a clay creature brought to life and magically made to serve and obey, but which (like Frankenstein’s monster) takes over. Our narrator, squeakily simple, lives with her brother Robert and a knitting old-fashioned Granny. With her equally unambitious, underachieving friends she has a punk band Annie and the Underdogs, which screams out “music to ruin your Christmas”, protesting against everything with Russell-Brandian vagueness but never actually doing gigs because of stage-fright.

 

 

Brother Robert is a geek, smelling of “unwashed hair and mathematics” who frequents the workshop of an apparently hopeless inventor called Phil Sylocate. Who, Wozniack-like, suddenly makes something that works: a lifesize clay figure (lumpen, grey, primitive) which obeys and does Robert’s job and housework for him. In a sentence which gets whoops of recognition Robert says “I like my work but I’d like to get it done for me, so I could move into a position of authority more suitable”. very BBC.

 

The inventor is taken over, selling his hipster soul to big industry, and at home Golem takes charge – he never needs to sleep or eat – and gets new ‘orders’. “So” asks Robert’s sister worriedly “someone has access to Golem, other than you?” Indeed. It happens to our iPhones and Clouds weekly. So with more barks of shamed recognition from the audience Golem upgrades to new powers, changes Robert’s life, puts him in ridiculous fashion clothes in his own image, and undermines his one real relationship (“She’s a frumpy 35 year old who wants to trick you into having babies. A modern man can do better”).

 

 

Paul Barritt’s animations are a marvel: cartoonish, beautiful, satirically rich (you’d need to see them twenty times to get all the jokes and references). The five performers interact with them surreally well: sometimes as living talking heads through holes of crazy changing bodies, sometimes walking amongst them. But equal credit to Suzanne Andrade’s droll, dry, savagely subversive, hilariously perceptive text (she also directs) . Lillian Henley’s music is played live: light, ragtimey, melding perfectly with the dark mocking tale.

 

 

For Golem wins, of course he does: Grandma herself accepts her new uselessness as “keeping up to date”, trapped inside a high-tech knitting-machine, and the punk band is corrupted into a brand. As is the show itself, with a final triumphant Golem cry of “The arts! We love the arts!”. The clay chap “adores” Benedict Cumberbatch and Helen Mirren. Oh yes, the laugh’s on us. But it’s a very good one.
box office 0207 922 2922 http://www.youngvic.org
to 31 Jan (extended!)
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GOLEM Young Vic SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

December 4, 2014 · 4:11 pm

VISITORS BUSH THEATRE, W12

SO LIFE GOES BY, WITH MELANCHOLY BEAUTY…

 

Is there anything more healing, more reassuring of human kinship than the sound of an audience sighing together, murmurously anxious, fondly touched or momentarily afraid for imaginary strangers in a pretend room?  There were moments, in Barney Norris’ tender meditation on life, love and memory, when it felt so intimate that you wanted to reach out a hand to Arthur, Edie, Stephen and Kate in their solitary home, with two armchairs under suggested beams and a World’s Classics subscription bookcase behind them.

 

 

This is one of those heartfelt family plays which the Bush suits well – Tom Wells’ The Kitchen Sink, Rory Kinnear’s The Herd come fondly to mind. Like those it is an author’s first full-length play, and a treasure. Yet it is the simplest of situations. Arthur and Edie – Robin Soanes and Linda Bassett – are in their 70s, Darby and Joan in the farmhouse where chickens cluck outside and time has stood still, contentedly, since the departure of their only child Stephen. He opted for another kind of life as an insurance salesman.

 

 

But Edie is in early dementia. So Stephen (brilliantly evoked as a slick, tense, unhappy character, bravely dislikeable at first) has arranged a “Homeshare” lodger Kate: a recent graduate, a bit daffy with a streak of blue hair and no direction yet. As Edie’s condition worsens, harsher decisions must be made to solve the simplest and saddest of problems: life. And as Edie puts it “to get through it all ok, get to your grave without much trouble”.

 

 

 

Bassett plays Edie with such truth and grace that her curtain-call normality is almost a shock. She has much to work with: Norris has an uncanny knack of evoking the poetry which can emerge from those wandering on the borders between amiable elderly wittering and dementia. She will be suddenly sharp (uncomfortably for her son at times) but then from her occluded depths say something so fine that you almost envy her. Late on, immobile in her chair, she watches sunlight. “Outline of the window crossing that stone, that’s the whole earth spinning, whole lives changing. You can watch it all from here”. And in one of the heartshakingly fond joshing conversations with Arthur (whose farmerly solidity is utterly convincing, and I know a lot of them) – she reminds us that she was always fun. She muses on whether to booby-trap the house for those who might live there after their death, planting fake ghosts and creaking floorboards. Or on how being “a despot” would enable you to keep the shops open late.

 

 
It is in part a sorrowful meditation on the gap between generations – the parents rustic, stable, simplehearted, churchgoing believers who never asked much of life; Stephen the child of the ‘70s, anxious, brittle, impatient, mercantile, thwarted without understanding why. And Kate, today’s girl, speaking lightly of therapy and empathy but still adrift.
But Norris does not let the parents off the hook. Slowly it becomes clear how difficult the relationship always was between the awkward Stephen and his Dad, and how neither parent ever understood him; and how painful is the contrast with Kate – not a settled adult yet, but one enchantingly able to bond and sing Elvis with old Edie. Eleanor Wyld gives her solid reality and immense adolescent charm, clumping in her Doc Martens, sweetness in her half-grown heart.

 

 
And in all the best plays its themes expand beyond their lives and the room to a reflection on life itself, fleeing past while we do something else. As Edie says, you can never pin down a moment which defines what we’re about. And when dementia closes in, you “can hardly tell which of the millions of lives I imagined I might have lived eventually turned out to the the real one. They are all as vivid and vague as each other”. Shattering.
BOX OFFICE 020 8743 5050 to 10 Jan

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on VISITORS BUSH THEATRE, W12

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

December 1, 2014 · 11:53 pm

ASSASSINS Menier, SE1

A CENTURY OF SADNESS, MADNESS, AND GUNS

 

 

“Angry men don’t write the rules, and guns don’t right the wrongs”. The message is unheard in the nightmare fairground, where beneath ragged seedy fairylights a bloodstained ,clown-faced zombie – a terrifying Simon Lipkin – becomes a series of presidential victims yet still presides over a surging brawling sea of misfits, megalomaniacs, fools and grudges. They bear guns, dream of changing everything by the twitch of a finger. Shots fire, electrocutions fizz, Charles Guiteau dances horribly on the scaffold in 1882 convinced he was right to shoot President Garfield. John Hinckley clutches the picture of Jodie Foster who might just notice him if he shot Reagan. Two young women aim at Gerald Ford and miss; down 110 years differing personalities struggle with life and conclude that the answer is to shoot the President. In the Texas Book Depository Lee Harvey Oswald is persuaded by the whole a pack of ghosts to join the line and be not called murderer but that grander name, “Assassin”.

 

 

You will wait a long time for something as unnerving, intelligent, sorrowful and sharply humane as this 105-minute musical. Once more the little Menier has turned up a quality of Sondheim revival which cements the reputation of the piece itself as much as the theatre’s. For Assassins was not really taken to the heart of Broadway in the patriotic Gulf War atmosphere of 1991; too sourly truthful, too willing to peer at the dark side of the American dream, where pursuit of happiness does not mean you actually get it. It is a reflection on nine people who have attempted to kill a US President, ever since the shot by John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. “Why did you do it, Johnny? You paved the way” sings the Balladeer, a banjo-toting voice of sanity in the lunatic shooting-gallery. He did indeed. Four succeeded.

 
Jamie Lloyd brings to the piece a violent vigour , a solidly breathless, can’t-look-away 105 minutes against Soutra Gilmour’s fairground design. The transverse stage gives unnervingly many opportunities for the assorted crazies to point their pistols right in our faces. Sondheim’s lyrics and music are as riveting as always, the John Weidman book contributes fierce economical dialogue and – even for those hazy on lesser-known presidents like William McKinley and James Garfield – an admirable clarity, despite the apparently random chronology and chaotic personalities.

 

 
Its grace is in expressing, sometimes in pathos and sometimes in wonderfully jarring rum-ti-tum merriment, an unexpected compassion for the helplessness, vanity, paranoia and delusion of the assassins. Moments of fearful levity are studded through it, as no doubt they are in any madhouse: Catherine Tate’s Sara Jane Moore and Carly Bawden’s Lynette Fromme are shockingly funny, Andy Nyman’s bluff, bearded, delusional Guiteau has a creepy fascination, and there is the great unforgettable monologue about the broken American dream by Mike McShane as Byck, in a grimy Santa suit and rusty Dodgem car. Jamie Parker is both the balladeer and, in a coup-de-theatre transformation at the hands of the assassin mob, the shivering baffled Lee Harvey Oswald, driven by ghosts and hopelessness to kill Kennedy.

 

 

All are fine performances: but this is an ensemble triumph, a coherent chaos of darkness and futility. It conveys Sondheim’s humane, grimly witty, always complex vision with intelligence,respect and truth.
Box office 020 7378 1713 to 7 March
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ASSASSINS Menier, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

November 18, 2014 · 11:52 pm

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Olivier, SE1

ALL HUMAN LIFE:  A TERRIBLE BEAUTY ON A RUBBISH TIP

 
In the interval of this headlong, crowded kaleidoscope of a play it was hard to know where the second part of David Hare’s script could go. With a 34-strong Asian cast, it is shaped from Katherine Boo’s painstaking three-year documentation of the Indian urban poor in Annawadi: the “undercity” scrabbling a living from the rubbish around Mumbai airport. Hidden behind the vast cosmetic posters for “Luxury Apartments” or “Beautiful Forever”, these are the ones the tourist board prefers we do not see.

 
And that first breathless act, using the vast panorama of the Olivier stage as a corrugated shanty town and bleak police station, felt like every human drama: a neighbourhood catfight, a cynically corrupt police-procedural, a social and environmental comment on global capitalism, a comedy of post-colonial manners, a touching portrait of teenage friendship, and at least two Greek tragedies. One involving fatal envy and self-immolation, another a young man’s a gesture of heroic idealism as powerful as Antigone’s. All this beneath the thundering shadow of jumbo jets, and centred on a patient, careful figure sorting rubbish. Plastic bottles fall like blessings from above , and Abdul (wonderful Shane Zaza), fills sacks, supports his family, only mildly grumbles that bottletops are half-metal half-plastic and need separating.

 
It is more than a documentary, though: India lives on tales, and the narrative is heart-hammeringly strong. My interval qualms were only because for the central Husain family – the ever-magnificent Meera Syal as its matriarch – it seemed to be all over.  They are accused of beating up the stroppy one-legged prostitute Fatima (a fiercely spirited Thusitha Jayasundera) who burns herself to death. The family fail to pay a bribe fast enough, and are variously imprisoned, tortured, and ruined. Life, however, goes on: and the second part is almost stronger, directing us not to schmaltzy “Slumdog Millionaire” feelgoodery but to an ironic conclusion of the case, and more importantly to something which can only be expressed in cliché: a tribute to the human spirit. Without spoilers, let me say that a line near the end about walking to a bus sparked an unexpected tear; and moments later a boy’s leap roused a cheer.

 
But as documentary too it is important, a good omen for the play’s director Rufus Norris, who takes over the NT reins next year. Katherine Boo’s book makes it firmly clear that these are not the abject, the poorest of the streets. In a rising economy, a BRIC nation, and they are the “not-poor”, economically active but intensely fragile in global changes: a Wall Street crash, observes the spry lad Sunil (Hiran Abeysekera) means they start cooking rats again. Vincent Ebrahim’s Karam curses “Don’t drop litter” posters, because without litter they starve. In the good times Syal’s matriarch swanks that although Abdul was born on the pavement outside the Intercontinental Hotel like a naked rat in the gutter, his hard work means they can afford a shelf in their shack and need not squat to cook. One rung above her is Asha , the local Mrs Fixit whose assignations with officials yet another rung above enable her to educate her daughter Manju – who in turn secretly teaches her friend Meena, a despairing unschooled captive of her family’s marriage plans.

 
With hilarious post-Colonial absurdity, what Manju passes on is Mrs Dalloway (“Who are these people? what do they do?”) and Congreve’s The Way of the World. Though she spots that Congreve is all about money, corruption and negotiated sex, just like Annawadi . Meanwhile the police chief can educate his son because of the bonus he gets for a 100% clear-up rate of murders, a statistic easily achieved by writing off a horribly mutilated young victim’s corpse as “Tuberculosis”. You do what you have to do, in Annawadi: as Zehrusina resignedly says “Everything is stolen!”. Or as Asha puts it more grandly “I have learned from First Class People, if you don’t think it’s wrong, it isn’t”. Sharp.

 
Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to March
NB TRAVELEX sponsorship: half the seats £ 15, others £ 25-£35.
NT LIVE in 550 cinemas 12 March 2015: http://www.ntlive.com
Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Olivier, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

November 16, 2014 · 6:01 pm

LA SOIREE South Bank SE1

BURLESQUE BLISS (AND BOON…)
There’s a towering, assertive giant gay blue rabbit in skintight Spandex, a stripping trapeze artiste hurling garments at the front row, a sadfaced clown who sings Cohen’s Hallelujah like a depressed angel; there is juggling and jokes and a superbly rude faux-baffled reading of a Mills and Boon sex scene. There are brief acts and sustained ones, a provocative diablo, a worrying contortionist, Ursula Martinez’ legendary hanky turn, hulahooping, quick-change transformations and a bathtub aerialist. And dammit, here’s the blue bunny again: lurking in the back stalls of the gorgeous mirrored Spiegeltent…why? Who knows.
I have loved these evenings ever since the first, in Edinburgh in 2004; call it new variety, or performance-cabaret, or circus burlesque, or whatever takes your fancy: it has been riotously successful, giving a platform to individual acts and forging an identity both pleasingly louche and unthreateningly friendly. That last quality is important, because not everyone is a natural nightclubber. As for the tag “not recommended for children” and the nudity warning, it must be said that its sexiness is not of the dead-eyed Soho variety. It is so joyfully self-mocking that I would very happily take a young teen (actually, it could be a useful corrective to the dreary porn they all see online).

 
And goodness, it’s fun. Partly because under the production of Brett Haylock the two-hour show is immaculately paced. This matters: I have been to similar events (with some of the same artistes) where heavyhanded ringmastering and a tolerance of iffy, slow-moving banter took much of the joy out of it. Here, however, there is no self-satisfied ringmaster but a swift, skilful segue of one act to the next, varying between the mainly funny and the breathtakingly acrobatic. It’s brilliant.

 

 

Aficionados and world travellers should know some names which headline this anniversary London run: Puddles Pity Party, an astonishing voice, is the big glum singing pierrot; Tanya Gagné of the Wau Wau sisters of NYC strips on the trapeze, you might see The English Gents, or David and Fofo from Sweden who spit ping-pong-balls. And from Australia Asher Treleaven is our Mills -and-Boon interpreter. His sad outraged “No – that’s not a Thing!” stays with me still.

 

 

Top night out, essence of joyful skill. I’m going again, on proper paid-for tickets: that’s how good it is.

+44 (0)20 7960 4200 http://www.la-soiree.com To 11 Jan

rating: five   4 Meece Ratingthe fifth being a Merry-Christmouse  libby, christmas cat

Comments Off on LA SOIREE South Bank SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 11, 2014 · 10:15 pm

NOT ABOUT HEROES Trafalgar 2, SW1

THE POETRY AND THE PITY

 
On this evening of Armistice day a hundred years on, no more fitting place to be than at this finely drawn revival of Stephen MacDonald’s two-hander about the WW1 soldier-poets. Here are Sassoon and Owen, young men in an unexpected friendship struggling with their own nightmares but also with the need, as a terrible new world dawned, to escape from orotund late-Victorian lyricism and express the grief of war without empty phrases or sentimentality. It was Wilfred Owen who wrote that his book would not be about heroes or “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power”: simply the pity of war, the poetry in the pity. He also wrote that his elegies would not be consolatory to his generation but “may be to the next”.

 
And so they are. More, in a way, than his friend Siegfried Sassoon’s: nothing in the century matches Owen’s immaculate directness in Anthem for Doomed Youth. When he reads it to his friend halfway through the play, a palpable tremor runs through the room, as if the bugles were still calling from sad shires.
But the power of the play – a respectful but inventive imagining of the friendship they forged at Craiglockhart War Hospital for nervous conditions – lies in more than the skilful use of letters, journals and poems, and in more than pathos.

 
The men rise as personalities, their friendship jokey, combative, and evolving with Owen’s growing confidence. Young men laugh sometimes, whatever times they endure, and so may we, surprisingly often. Alasdair Craig is Sassoon: taller, chiselled, with an upper-class brittleness. He was few years older and already a published poet, and a decorated war hero so independent-minded that he risked an public statement of “Wilful Defiance” against the war’s prolongation in 1917 and threw his military cross in the Mersey. So, with political cunning, he was sent to Craiglockhart rather than court-martialled.

 
Knocking on his door comes little Owen: stammering, hero-worshipping, sweating with social diffidence, Simon Jenkins is every inch the provincial clerk of the period: smooth centre parting and small moustache, a figure like Forster’s Leonard Bast. The relationship begins with Sassoon as amused mentor and critic, until he recognizes the ardent gift and becomes Owen’s champion, introducing him to figures like Robert Graves (“A man one likes better after he’s left the room”). Woven into their passionate discussions of poetry are moments of war news, of 250,000 lost at Passchendaele. For both will go back, Sassoon with death-wishing anger -“More like being drunk than being brave” – Owen because he is afraid after his first experience, and needs to know whether he can endure side by side with those whose deaths he mourns in verse. He could. He died a hero, a week before the Armistice. Sassoon had to live on nearly fifty years, but published his friend’s poems.

 
Caroline Clegg’s magnificent, understatedly fine production for Feelgood has toured to Craiglockhart, to Catterick, across Britain and to Northern France. It is good that it finds a home so close to the Cenotaph this winter. Don’t miss it.

 
box office 0845 505 8500 to 6 December
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on NOT ABOUT HEROES Trafalgar 2, SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

October 29, 2014 · 12:13 am

’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

DARKNESS VISIBLE:  CANDLELIT HORRORS, ANCIENT SORROWS

 

 

By the end of three hours the gilt-reflecting candlelight of this little jewel-box playhouse is flickering over a birthday party littered with bloodstained corpses. Father, son, bridegroom – plus the offstage corpse whose heart has been waved around on a sword like a kebab. And that’s not counting the one murdered an hour earlier in a terrifying total blackout, his death agonies revealed by dark-lantern. Or the plotter who died a slow, agonizing and eloquent death by her own potion. The robed Cardinal, meanwhile, being Italian Catholic and therefore a convenient satirical villain for post-Reformation England, winds up the play speaking the words of the title and coolly ordering that the matter be hushed up (by sending another victim to be “burnt to ashes”) and confiscating that the dead family’s riches for the Church.

 

 

None of these magnificent disasters, however, are the reason John Ford’s dark drama spent a couple of centuries pretty much unperformed. Its real scandal (nicely emphasised this week by Transport for London banning the poster) is sexual. The tragedy is triggered by the incestuous love of Giovanni (Max Bennett, carrying it through convincingly from touchingly young and ardent to deranged) and his sister Annabella (Fiona Button gives her a spirited beauty and startlingly contemporary assertiveness).

 
That this will lead to disaster is clear from the first tense scene in which Giovanni confesses his desires to the Friar with “It is my fate that leads me on” and then lies to his sister – who is equally inclined – that he “asked counsel of the Holy Church” and got permission. And so, with tumbling naked grace, to bed. While other suitors and side-plotters pursue their ends the knotty text – beautifully handled with clarity and pace under director Michael Longhurst – is studded with fascinating philosophical efforts to justify this incest. Though more endearing is from Morag Siller, a delight as the bawdily robust maid Putana: “If a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody!”.

 

 
Indeed an admirable pleasure of this production is in its balancing of violence, darkness and horror with earthy comic absurdity. One of the most striking performances is from James Garnon – lately brilliant in the big Globe as Dr Scroggy – who plays an idiotic lad forced by his rich uncle to try for Annabella’s hand. He delivers it as Tim-nice-but-dim crossed with a less bright Boris Johnson: larky and tactless and hilarious until the extraordinarily touching moment when he falls in love with another girl entirely with a burstingly boyish “Lass, pretty lass, come!”. Yet this lovely bearer of comic relief is doomed too: murdered by mistake. The ultimate engine of his destruction, and of much else, is a slighted hellcat Hippolyta, given a terrifying energy (and some good rude twerking in disguise) by Noma Dumezweni.

 

 

The production is particularly fine when you consider how complicated and treble-stranded Ford’s plot is: newcomers, do not read the synopsis, it’ll only scare you. Onstage there is absolute clarity and accessibility not only in the speech, but in Alex Lowde’s skilful use of costume: tweakingly updated and carefully distinctive to character, whether Giovanni’s student-casual tights, Annabella’s anachronistically wispy dresses, or the slyly absurd, ultimately horrifying presence of gold party hats at the disastrous final banquet.

 

 

And there is the candlelight. I am a pushover for the Wanamaker’s rising and falling beeswax candelabras, the handheld candles throwing alarming shadows, and the ritual gradual dowsings. When the Friar describes hellfire to a desperate Annabella, around them like her hopes the flames die out one by one at the hands of dark servants. Brrrr.

 

Box office 020 7401 9919 to 7 Dec

rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

October 24, 2014 · 12:50 am

MEMPHIS – Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2

“LIKE A SAD OLD MELODY, TEARS YOU UP AND SETS YOU FREE,  THAT’S HOW MEMPHIS SEEMS TO ME’

 
“Ain’t no daytime on Beale Street, only nighttime!’ Delroy’s joint is jumping, Felicia (a glorious Beverley Knight) belting it out at the microphone. Around them, dancers hurtle and dazzle. In walks Huey (Killian Donnelly), beautifully brash and geeky in a pork-pie hat. The dancing stops, Huey wonders why. “You notice anything different?” enquires Delroy sarcastically. Yep. Everyone else is this Memphis joint in 1951 is black. The only “White folks” who call are police requiring bribes.

 
And there, neat as you like, is the core and the point of this fabulous musical, fresh from Broadway and done with honour and huge heart by a British cast. Joe diPietro and composer David Bryan have imagined the moment in the early ‘50s when rock and roll was born, or “stolen”, for white kids to share and adapt the wealth of black r & b and gospel. Huey is a composite of several radio DJs who championed the music to the horror of white society: the story follows his passion for R& B – “the music of my soul!” and his star-crossed love for Felicia (in Tennessee “miscegenation” was still illegal). She, played with glorious vigour and pathos by Beverley Knight, is another composite of the early black divas. Huey gets his first radio job by literally breaking in to the studio, becomes a star, gets on TV, and perilously – ultimately disastrously – tangles with a social establishment which even “up North” in New York can’t accept mixing.

 

 

But oh, how the staid white folks of the ‘50s needed the new music! Some wonderful comic moments show tidily dressed shoppers and passers-by seduced by the energy, hips suddenly starting to wiggle free beneath tight repressed little suits (“Everybody wants to be black on a Saturday niiiight!”). Even Huey’s grumpy racist-Christian mother Gladys (Clare Machin, fresh from Pajama Game and hilarious as ever) undergoes a conversion, slyly assisted by their new financial prosperity. One visit to the gospel church she once shunned , and she is ready to “Testify!!”

 

 

There are individual great numbers, both high-energy and plaintive, and Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is breathtaking. But the joy of the show – kept moving with neat transitions by director Christopher Ashley – is in its belief that energy and music and youthful goodwill can win in the end, despite time and tears. There is comedy (racism is always absurd, as are radio studios, and Mark Roper’s Mr Simmons the WHBC boss is lovely). There are brief shocking brutalities. There is an immensely moving subplot involving Gator (Tyrone Huntley) whose father’s lynching left him mute from the age of five but who finds his voice at the crisis.

 

 

Altogether, the balance and line of the story work perfectly: on Broadway, I hear the end is more downbeat; here despite Huey’s professional downfall here the explosive joy is restored, if only in the music. Fair enough: “Say a prayer that change is a-coming” doesn’t imply that it’ll be quick.
And on a personal note, let me confirm that the stiff-backed sexual horror of “good white Christian folks” at music crossing the race border rings absolutely true. In my year in a South African convent in 1962, the nuns banned Elvis records because he sang and moved in a “black” way. Cliff Richard was allowed because he sang and moved in a “white” manner. True! So I danced out singing the last chorus “Listen to the beat, hear what’s in your soul, let it make you whole! Don’t let anyone steal your rock ’n roll!”. Even nuns.

 

 

box office 020 7379 5399 shaftesburyboxoffice@shaftesburytheatre.com
to 28 March

rating : five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MEMPHIS – Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

October 16, 2014 · 1:47 pm

LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL

 

 

This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology suggests that it may have had the other title, usually thought of as a “lost” play. The doubling with Love’s Labour’s Lost (reviewed below, well worth catching them in order, and reading them in the right order might help too) was inspired by AD Gregory Doran’s theory that the witty Berowne and spirited Rosaline from LLL should get together in the end, like Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado. Hence director Luscombe’s use of the same company, the same lovely Charlecote Park set, and (not least) the way that Nigel Hess’ fine score weaves through both, moving between Crown-Imperial heroics, subtle atmospherics, and sweetly sung ballads to pastiche Edwardian tunes.

 

 

The cross-casting is not all literal (you couldn’t turn Chris McCalphy’s magnificent monosyllabic Constable Dull into a yattering Dogberry, so Nick Haverson ramps up his hectic comedy still further , to the point of mania indeed, with high-speed pomposity, verbal confusion and an unforgettable tic of outrage. As we join them in 1918, as Charlecote Park is requisitioned by the returning army. David Horovitch, still pedantic and bufferish but less absurd, is now Leonato and gives the horrified father real power in the church scene; Michelle Terry is the striding, head-girlish, scornfully witty Beatrice, who like her more delicate cousin Hero (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) has been working as a VAD nurse. That, artfully, makes her air of cynical new toughness credible. And Edward Bennett, who was lively and fun enough as Berowne, now flowers into the most likeable, funniest and most genuinely touching Benedick since Charles Edwards’ fabulous Globe performance.

 

 

The Charlecote set comes even more into its own, as does the machinery. The stage has immense depths so that distant rooms glide forward, and far beneath the sliding floor unseen subterranean stagehands (take a bow) enable fine little rooms rooms to rise on that ever-surprising platform: a billiard-room, a boudoir , a bier, and most superbly poor Dogberry’s overcrowded scullery. It is serving as a police station, where Haverson tries to iron his shirt while interrogating, teapots get in everybody’s way, the washing-up is still in progress, and nobody can get out of the room because the towel-rail is jammed against the dishrack. Dogberry gets his foot stuck in a bowl marked DOG, which is particularly pleasing.

 

 

Once again, the anachronistic period setting serves the plot just fine: intrigues and jealousies are entirely credible in a regimental setting, all mess-dress and missed promotions. Sam Alexander is a sullenly malevolent Don John, Chris Nayak an over-willing Borachio (his remorseful moment near the end is more convincingly done than I’ve seen it, happy debut-season Mr Nayak). There’s real solemnity and horror in the church scene and the grieving; and broad, beautiful comedy in the eavesdropping. Especially the bit with Benedick and the giant Christmas tree. One of my more solemn colleagues felt that the near-electrocution moment was a bit over the top, but hey – some ideas are just too good to drop.

 
And that’s a moral which applies to the whole doubling, WW1-referring enterprise. So four each, but between them, they earn a fifth mouse.
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
(and the CD is now released, both plays)
Rating: four 4 Meece Rating
and a fifth director-mouse for  the double…  Director Mouse resized

Comments Off on LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

Filed under Five Mice, Four Mice

Tagged as

October 14, 2014 · 11:18 pm

GYPSY Chichester Festival Theatre

EVERYTHING COMES UP ROSES FOR THIS ONE. OH YES.

 
It is not often in a big musical that you remember the silences: the pin-drop, tense waits. But then, Gypsy was no run-of-the-mill musical, even in the golden age. In most shows the moment when the thwarted, ambition-crazed stage mother Rose cries “Everyone needs something impossible to hope for” should make her a feelgood heroine, a follower of her star, or at least a sad victim. Not a deluded, irresistible engine of family destruction.

 
But in Jonathan Kent’s superb, tense, funny and melancholy production Imelda Staunton both grips us in her headlong pursuit of showbiz fame for her children, and shakes us in those few deep silences. Her alarming stillness as she reads the letter telling her that the favoured Baby June has escaped her grip makes more violent the explosion when ,like a heat-seeking missile, she turns to her dowdier daughter Louise and cries “I made her – and I will make you!”. The audience actually gasps, even though as loving aficionados of this extraordinary chronicle, we knew that Mama Rose is about to launch into the enormous Act 1 closer, that hymn to dangerous ambition, “Everything’s coming up roses!”.

 

 

Staunton was last on this stage – and also singing Sondheim lyrics – in Kent’s equally magnificent Sweeney Todd. But that moment alone tops her Olivier-winning Mrs Lovett. She hurtles at it, jumps in frenzy, claps violently like an out-of-control clockwork toy, filling the immense theatre as if she was standing a foot in front of each of us, forcing us against our will to seek the evanescent goal of stardom. It’s like that all through: stubborn craziness veiling vulnerability, envy, fear of defeat. She is magnificent from the first moment when she erupts through the stalls clutching a terrier and harassing Uncle Jocko to give her daughters top billing . She’s all the Mama Rose that the show’s creators – Laurents and Styne and Sondheim – could have dreamed of back in 1959.

 

 
She is not its only jewel. Kent’s production is finely judged, trimmed a little of the show’s sprawl, staged with minimal fuss, the theatre’s new machinery delivering interiors for boarding-houses, dressing-rooms and atmospheric, looming backstage flies. Stephen Mear’s choreography is as witty as ever, expressing all the nuances: the half-baked performances of Mama Rose’s touring troupe, the cheerfully hopeless family ensembles with good old Herbie, and – when Lara Pulver’s gentle undervalued Louise emerges as Gypsy Rose Lee – her gradual transformation from terror to extravagantly brittle flamboyance. Pulver carries it brilliantly. As for Staunton’s own final enraged aria of thwarted ambition, the mixture of extreme foxy moves and sudden lapses into the diffident stumping of the middle-aged matron is both funny and profoundly moving.

 

 
What else? Everything, really. Kevin Whateley, beloved as Detective-Inspector Lewis, deploys his gift for intelligent rueful likeability as Herbie (and he can sing, never knew that),. As the child June at the beginning, Georgia Pemberton on first-night duty delivered some atrociously brilliant high-kicks, cartwheels and earsplittingly shrill Violet-Elizabeth-Bottery before being artfully morphed into her adult self (Gemma Sutton) by way of strobing lights and hurtling ensemble dancers. The three Act 2 burlesque strippers are pretty unforgettable too: Anita Louise Combe with some nicely dirty ballet moves (don’t sacrifice your sacro, working in the back row!) Julie Legrande with flashing tits and pubes, and Louise Gold towering muscular and ferocious in her centurion kit and bugle (“if you’re going to bump it, do it with a trumpet”).

 

 

Sorry, can’t stop quoting Sondheim lines it’s an illness. But if you can wrestle, wangle or seductively pole-dance a ticket off someone, this one’s well worth sacrificing your sacro for.

 
box office 01243 781312 to 8 November
rating    five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GYPSY Chichester Festival Theatre

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

October 10, 2014 · 12:39 am

HENRY IV Donmar, WC1

BACK TO PRISON:  WOMEN WIN THE HOLLOW CROWN

 
This is epic and intimate, mischievous and macho, truthful and painful and bleak. A two-hour condensation of the Henry IV plays, set in the grim neon-lit gym of a women’s prison, is the second in Phyllida Lloyd’s trilogy of all-woman Shakespeares, in collaboration with the prison arts company Clean Break. Their Julius Caesar, I wrote last year, was one of those rare theatre moments when you feel  that something genuinely important has happened:  a seismic shift in the possible.  Harriet Walter’s Brutus shook off every preconception about gender onstage, for good.
 
I was not relying on Lloyd pulling off the same shock again. Bunny Christie’s original set, finessed by Ellen Nabarro (andI have seen drama in enough prison gyms to vouch for it’s authenticity) is familiar. So are the unsmiling warders ushering us in, and the motley cast of “inmates” in grey tracksuits and scraped-back hair. At first, Clare Dunne’s Irish-accented Hal failed to convince me, though I was rapidly drawn in by the gaunt commanding presence of Harriet Walter as the eponymous King, guilt-haunted Bolingbroke in a crown made of Irn-Bru cans, and by Jade Anouka as a superfit, gym-honed passionate Hotspur beating hell out of a punchbag. But we needed to know that this most macho of the History plays could, by being transposed from 15c monarchy to a women’s jail, show us something new.

 

 

It can. It did. What Lloyd achieves, with respect for the verse and a series of feinting, elegant scenic overlaps,  is a breathtaking double vision. These are women sometimes wholly being men, sometimes implying that they are women damaged by life, slyly aping male swagger and aggression. Ashley McGuire’s Falstaff is a delight: part natural-born market-stall virago, part cross-dressing parody; always carrying that quicksliver burden of wasted intelligence in Falstaff which fuels that essentially womanly speech despising male “honour” for its inability to heal wounds of war. McGuire does this alone under the pitiless searchlight, and achieves a seriousness as great as Roger Allam’s marvellous treatment of the part at the Globe.

 

 

Amother double vision flickers throughout: prisoners of circumstance and their own fallibilities, the cast’s status as inmates remind us of what Shakespeare compassionately knew – that Kings and princes, drunkards and whoremongers, like all of us, are prisoners of circumstance too: guilty anxious Henry, rebellious Hal doomed to change beneath the ‘polished perturbation’ of the crown, impulsive loyal avenging Hotspur, Falstaff in his prison of flesh and flippancy. Just as we forget they are playing prison inmates doing a play, twice quite shockingly they get too involved and the lights go up as warders rush in to break it up. Once it happens when the sexual taunting of Mistress Quickly becomes modern and explicit, and she screams with sudden real womanly revulsion “We agreed we weren’t going to do this fucking bit!”. And once again at the end, when Falstaff’s rejection meets a violent response, warders intervene as we see inmates mastered and wounded by the power of the tale they have enacted. As we all should be.

 
But the core moments of the play are straight, unambiguous and fine. Harriet Walter, once again, achieves depth and reality to match any of her great predecessors in the role: androgynous, gaunt, thoughtful, troubled, “Myself, mighty and to be feared”. Dunne’s Hal grows in stature, their deathbed scene together superb. Other moments startle with their virtuosity: Ann Ogbomo’s passionate Worcester, Cynthia Erivo’s mischievous Poins. It’s tremendous, a brick in theatre history. I hope they auction off the terrifying paper masks of Walters’ face which her troops wear in the battle. I’ll be bidding.

 

 

box office 0844 871 7624 to 30 Nov
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating
Sponsors: Barclays / Simmons & Simmons

Comments Off on HENRY IV Donmar, WC1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

September 26, 2014 · 1:01 am

THE KEY WILL KEEP THE LOCK Olivier, SE1

THE JAMES PLAYS GET OFF TO A TERRIFIC START…

 

 

This one’s a stormer: thrilling, funny, vigorous, beguiling, accessible, a gripping and entertaining blend of the epic and the intimate. James McArdle (it’s his only appearance in the trilogy) appears first as the hostage of the ailing Henry V, a still, watchful, deep-felt exile after eighteen years’ captivity, a lonely poet-prince torn from Scotland at the age of ten. Henry decrees that he must marry one of his English cousins Joan, return home, raise his ransom and stop his countrymen siding with the French. He must accept the rules of medieval royalty: “You have to fuck people you don’t know and execute their relatives!”

 

 
Yet despite Munro’s mischievous demotic there is solemnity too, always a sense that these things matter, that beyond the court peasants starve. The opening tolls a great bell, over a ferocious brawl of loutish captured Scots and a chant both martial and melancholy. But just as you begin to wince at the farouche struggles of sweaty, hairy medieval manhood aflame with profanity and roiling testosterone, Munro switches the scene to the Queen-to-be, Joan.

 

 

 

Anxiously housewifely, expecting royal visitors, here is a rushed chatelaine fretting about supplies and the fact that they have no minstrel to greet the visitors -“Nobody here can hold a tune since blind Eric choked on an apple”. Stephanie Hyam is wonderful in the role; so is Sarah Higgins as Meg, a cheerful Scottish lady-in-waiting sent to persuade her that for all the primitivism she’ll love Scotland “Tall skies, rowan trees, fresh silver fish and dancing”. The awkward, compelled courtship of the royal pair is an unexpected delight: never thought I would hear gales of fond laughter across the Olivier at a dynastic wedding-ceremony. Or indeed witness the official wedding night defloration on a four-poster surrounded by louche leather-clad and seriously drunken nobles. Munro indicates that Joan takes a good while to get over this.

 

 
James’ struggle pits him against the resident Stuart cousins: the mop-haired heroic patriarch Murdac (Gordon Kennedy, a key figure in all three plays in different roles) , his ferocious sons and their mother Isabella. Their landed arrogance entails casual torture of the common people (a woman daring to complain is shod, horse-nails hammered on her hands and feet). Defying them, McArdle is a superb James, all tense national pride shot through with the private neediness of his lost childhood. His speech about Scotland’s quality and dignity is so stirring that it could have swung the referendum in moments.

 

 
This struggle, and his lonely yearning for the love of his frightened little queen creates a real story: epic but personal, suddenly solemn at times, dramatically intense as he stiffens for the final battle which – thrilling, balletic, intense – rages literally around and upon the great bed where Joan lies in labour. The seeds of his coming murder are sown by a violent necessary betrayal, the price of kingship in a savage age: Joan watches the invisible beheadings with eyes open, hoping that the fluttering of her gown in the bitter wind disguises her trembling.

 

 

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE KEY WILL KEEP THE LOCK Olivier, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

September 26, 2014 · 1:01 am

DAY OF THE INNOCENTS Olivier, SE1

…AND IT GROWS DARKER

 

 

James I is dead. His small son, defaced by a birthmark, puny and afraid, in surreal nightmare sequences constantly relives the bloodshed and concealment of the days when he was seized and bargained for between his mother , the cool contemptuous regent Livingston (Gordon Kennedy again) ) and Crichton. Sometimes he is literally a puppet, a naked skinny peg-creature thrown in and out of chests while the adult James (Andrew Rothney) stands by watching his own helplessness. His childhood and youthful friend is Will Douglas (Mark Rowley) , battered and beaten son of the thuggish Earl (Peter Forbes). Indeed the first half of this second play feels more heavy-going than before: everyone seems either a weakling or a bully, and the bloodied creatures of James’ nightmares momentarily confusing. I nearly concurred with a general view expressed after its Edinburgh performance that this play was the weakest, as well as the darkest; the one to miss.
Not so. Beneath the great sword, the second half flares into something intense: James grows up, begins defying Livingston’s contempt (“Your lazy wee Majesty – sign here”). It becomes spectacular – not least because they seem by now to have invented both the bagpipes and football, with a leather sphere punted round and out into the stalls in a ferocious, biting, wrestling, snarling football match of Stuarts vs Douglases (top choreography). The unravelling of the friendship between James and the damaged, reckless Will becomes one burning focus: another – for Munro never forgets the women – is the gradual emergence of a steely nature in his tiny yellow-haired foreign wife Mary (Hyam again, unrecognizable, and a remarkable presence both comic and dramatic).

 

 

More Douglas-on-Douglas violence ends in Will’s dangerous emergence as something new, No spoilers: but again Munro surprises at the most tense moments with genuine, laugh-out-loud comic moments. I particularly treasured Will’s sullen summing-up of what Scotland offers its nobles with “I’m supposed to be a rich man because I’ve got another hundred wet sheep”

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on DAY OF THE INNOCENTS Olivier, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

August 22, 2014 · 12:48 am

GUYS AND DOLLS – Chichester Festival Theatre

A WINNING ROLL OF THE DICE FOR CHICHESTER

 

 

There is a sort of generosity, an overflowing vigour, when Chichester’s great three-sided arena does the classic musicals. They can’t be safely confined in a proscenium frame but have to pour out in three directions, sharpening the need for story and character, spilling the cast sometimes among us, bursting into 3D choreography with dazzling movement and gorgeous compositions of colour and piled-up shape. And of all the great musicals, none offers more of everything than Frank Loesser’s exuberant 1950 fairytale of gamblers, showgirls and tambourine-banging missionaries out to convert them.

 

The book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows drew on Damon Runyon’s world: a sunny, larky, almost Wodehousian interpretation of New York lowlife. And here, beneath a great illuminated arc of nostalgic advertising posters – pure Disney, in a good way – Gordon Greenberg’s production sings and soars unfettered. The choreography – acrobatic to the point of insanity – is by Carlos Acosta, no less, supported by Andrew Wright: the gamblers in their suits and ties leapfrog, hurtle, somersault in a melée of precise chaos. “Siddown you’re rocking the boat” is phenomenal, and the crap-shooting dance down the sewers almost equally astonishing. As for the women, Anabel Kutay leads a Havana dance which becomes still wilder as the degenerating brawl incorporates Clare Foster’s disinhibited missionary Sergeant Sarah, and Sophie Thompson’s Miss Adelaide in the Hot Box club is backed by plenty of slyly witty, naffly innocent ensemble hoofing in gingham corsetry or strippable mink stoles.

 

When the cast are in motion there is always something to amaze: while Peter McKintosh’s overarching design of ads (Oreo! Cadillac! Camel!) is sometimes reflected in the shiny floor until the cast seem to be floating in a circular mirage of light and colour. And they themselves – perfect right down to the men’s two-tone co-respondent shoes and snazzy socks – form patterns rarely less than perfect.

 

But enough about the look of the thing. Its wit is more the point: the spoken dialogue (of which there is more than many musicals) is sharp and funny, giving scope for subtleties of character. Jamie Parker, chiselled and cool, lets the character of Sky Masterson breathe and genuinely change as he falls in love with Sarah; Peter Polycarpou’s harassed Nathan Detroit has a nice unwilling charm, his confreres (especially Harry Morrison as Nicely Nicely and dour, towering Nic Greenshields as Big Jule) each stand out distinct. Neil McCaul as Abernethy the minister creates in his small moments something genuinely lovable and precious. And Greenberg’s detail never misses a passing joke, not least when he makes momentarily solid the women’s dreams of a ruralized Nathan and domesticated Sky. It takes only seconds, that, but adds to the sum of happiness; so does the real steam from the New York pavement gratings and the momentary appearance (twice) of a wobbly nun on a bicycle with a collecting-bucket.

 

Hard to pick out stars, but the obvious, irresistible, fabulously broad performance is Sophie Thompson’s as Miss Adelaide. Who could resist that high Bronx twang swooping down to a dismayed baritone, her barmy dancing, or that angular anxiety – both hilarious and heartbreaking – about the ever-vanishing wedding day resolved in a final sisterly duet with Sergeant Sarah? Not me.

 

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312 to 21 Sept
Sponsors Henry Adams / Reynolds / Seaward
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GUYS AND DOLLS – Chichester Festival Theatre

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

August 21, 2014 · 12:42 am

DOGFIGHT – Southwark Playhouse, SE1

WARM, WONDERFUL,  WISE..THE YEAR’S BEST NEW MUSICAL

 

 

Strewth! What a wonderful show.  In this trade we are cautious of superlatives, lest omething even better comes along and renders us weaponless. Nor am I a target audience for American fringe-musicals chewing over the emotional wreckage of the Vietnam war, and the green boys who came back (if they were lucky) to find themselves both traumatized and unpopular. No Woottom Bassett welcomes for most of them, poor devils.

 

But this –  book by Peter Duchan, with plaintive, both folky and rock-wild music and lyrics by Banj Pasek and Justin Paul – is special. Not just because the young men are so roughly, endearingly young and nervously macho, and  move with an energy both joyful and menacing (Matt Ryan directs, Lucie Pankhurst choreographs). Nor is it mere nostalgia, though set in San Francisco in 1967, sliding back as a memory-play to ’63 and the night before embarkation. It has real dramatic energy, never flagging or overstating the obvious, and within the musical form lies a very good play: a romantic, hard-edged and humane love story with universal feeling at its heart.

 

The “Dogfight” of the title is a nasty squaddie ritual for the last night : a pre-brothel prize for whoever can pick up the ugliest girl and get her to a dance to be judged.  Marine Eddie (a waiflike Jamie Muscato, half-lost boy, half-lout) finds Rose, a chubby shy waitress. His basic shy decency makes him gradually hesitate as she blossoms in innocent delight at her first date, but macho comradeship defeats his doubts. We cringe for her, singing to herself anxiously as she dresses (in a truly awful bow-belted party frock) and hoping her beau will be “nothing short of wonderful”.   By this time, I have to tell you, the entire room is helplessly in love with Laura Jane Mathewson, fresh out of the Royal Academy of Music and in her first job. Gotta be Newcomer of the Year: she’s a jewel.

 

Goodness, they say, writes white: but Matthewson gives Rose a beautiful guileless sweetness , never bland, wholly credible, girlish, emotionally vulnerable but with a fierce intelligence. She shines, but – no Madam Butterfly – delights us further with some sharp feminist-cum-motherly scolding when she discovers her humiliation, and more when Eddie remorsefully tries to make it up to her. Their rapprochement is enchantingly – and funnily, and melodiously – achieved. Add a lovely swooping voice, clear and warm, and a seemingly unselfconscious womanly physicality and..well! strong men swoon, and women who were once chubby girls in wrong dresses whoop and cheer. Remember that name. Laura Jane Matthewson!

 

Around these two is gathered a strong cast, notably Nicholas Corre as a geeky virginal fellow-marine with nervous doubts, and Rebecca Trehearn as a minxy tart. Behind them on a towering section of the Golden Gate Bridge an six-piece band sounding twice the size. Ask no more. It’s almost perfect.

 

box office 020 7407 0234 to 13 Sept

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on DOGFIGHT – Southwark Playhouse, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

August 7, 2014 · 9:23 am

MY NIGHT WITH REG Donmar, WC1

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT AIDS…
Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play is pretty much perfect: a twist on the traditional drawing-room, single-set comedy of sex, love, friendship and death. Directing, Robert Hastie does it full justice. In two unbroken hours here is a constantly involving, slyly funny and heartbreaking production.
That is the first thing to say, and should precede the standard description of it as a famous play about gay men and an important landmark in writing about the AIDS crisis of the 1990’s. Not that it is a rant against social prejudice: indeed you would hardly know that there was any. A flippant toast “To gross indecency!” carries no implied legal terrors as it would have done before Wolfenden; and when Eric the Brummie barman casually says, pretty unbothered, that his comprehensive wasn’t like the film Another Country – “if you were a poof they threw you in the canal and pissed on you”. Gay rights are not Elyot’s message, unless incidentally through the lovability of the characters. For all their campery, these are just six people in a tangle of friendship and love: only one explicitly fears AIDS, and the two deaths occurring between scenes might almost as well be cancer.
That’s its strength: but of course a “gay” play has advantages over farces and tragedies set in the ‘straight” world. You can complicate your sexual relationships faster than Feydeau if anyone can sleep with anyone (and anyone probably will have had a night, or part thereof, with the unseen Reg). Gay men are also, forgive the stereotype, often gifted at satiric, savage and explicit verbal humour, which rapidly ramps up the comedy. It also helps defuse and pivot the moments of high emotion, and there are many: for sudden male tears and embraces are more natural. Then add to that – especially twenty years away from gay marriage and the domestic normalization of today – the ability to play with some un-British closeness across class barriers: the barman with four CSEs and the public-school toff, the copywriter with the smart flat and the lorry-driver (“though I think he’s really a florist”). It all helps.

But it is not a play of stereotypes and special pleading. It drills into universals: the uses and limits of sex, the blind alley and brief relief of hookups, the yearning for intimacy, the ache of jealousy, Spender’s “grave evening demand for love” . At its heart is a superb performance by Jonathan Broadbent as Guy: tubby, fussy, decent, maternal, frustrated, everybody’s confidant and nobody’s first choice. He is achingly funny and heartbreakingly noble. Julian Ovenden and Geoffrey Streatfield are the glamour-boys whose conquistador pride crumbles into grief and longing; Lewis Reeves the barman, wisest of them all. Outside that circle – though nobody escapes Reg – Richard Cant is funny and sad as Bernie, sinuously lovesick for his nonchalant brutal bus-driver Benny (Matt Bardock, cocksure in every sense).

 

So, not a “gay play”, cultish and exclusive. Shock, betrayal, the comfort of touch echo in us all. And plenty of conventional spouses might ruefully echo Benny’s observation that sometimes you never realize what a bore your partner is until you’re both out with other people. Brilliant.

 

Box Office 0844 871 7624 to Supported: Barclays /Simmons & Simmons
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MY NIGHT WITH REG Donmar, WC1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

July 30, 2014 · 1:48 am

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE – Young Vic SE1

 

DELUSION AND DESIRE IN THE DEEP SOUTH

 

If you are on one of the high back-row benches there is a bar to rest your feet on. It can create for a moment the illusion of being on a roller-coaster, braced for a wild ride. By the second half of this stunning production that sense was powerful indeed. One would have been quite grateful for a lap-strap.

 

The Young Vic is particularly suited to Tennessee Williams. Its habitual audiences (I came a day after the press night) have a warmth often missing in more formal and expensive theatres. You are more likely to hear gasps, even murmurs of “Nooo!”. This passionate unselfconscious identification serves the lyrical compassion of Williams very well, for his great gift is to lay before us the flawed, the deluded and disappointed, giving them language so beautiful that love reaches out even to the worst.

 

Director Benedict Andrews as director has updated setting and costumes, putting Blanche duBois, her sister Stella and Stella’s thuggish husband Stanley Kowalski right here in the 21st century. And although it is a play of its time, of a tough new America kicking aside the gentilities of the old South, this works : skinny, sensous Vanessa Kirby in her pedal-pushers and sneakers conveys the downwardly-mobile contentment of Stella, Ben Foster’s Kowalski is a volatile, chippy, crop-haired ex-sergeant from anyone’s army, and Gillian Anderson’s Blanche – over-groomed and unstable in her desperate refinement – could again belong to any age. Magda Willi’s design is revolutionary too (literally: the skeletally suggested two-room apartment at 632 Elysian Fields turns slowly round through most of the play, making its first uneasy move at the moment when Blanche dives into her sister’s cupboard for the first drink.

 

Its movement, like a slow-motion grinding of inexorable Fortune’s wheel, means that our view of the claustrophobic struggle is enriched by seeing “offstage” moments in bathroom or bedroom: around it on the floor and fire-escape occasional neighbours bicker or chase, and at one heart-stilling moment, with Blanche spilling out her terrible truths to Mitch in dim silhouette, a Mexican vendor wanders by offering “Flores por los muertes” as if they are the dead walking. As Mitch leaves, Blanche drags on a Miss Havisham ballgown to deck her latest fantasy before Kowalski – with horrid symbolism – digs impatiently through the layers of pink net to rape her.

 

 

Much has been said about Gillian Anderson’s remarkable performance, taking Blanche through to final pathetic craziness through superior, princessy snobbery, unsettling flirtatiousness, strident rebukes to the hitherto contented Stella and lady-of-the manor insults to Kowalski (a very funny moment has him standing behind her in the doorway, hearing her tirade about his apehood). It is a brilliant performance, in a part which is always disturbing because her desperate Southern-Lady monologues about culture , beauty and art and a ‘little temporary magic that ought to be the truth” are, face it, actually expressing just what the average theatregoer believes about art and culture. Thus the very arguments which hold us in our seats are being brutally guyed as a cover for Blanche’s degradation and drunken descent into madness. Cruel.

 

Other performances are also remarkable: Vanessa Kirby’s Stella catches the practical sensuality and shrugging, loving acceptance of her bit-of-rough husband, but also brings to life her love of Blanche and the old fealty of the lost Belle-Rive homestead. And Foster – who at first I thought too slight and uncharismatic for Kowalski – soon astonishes by making sudden terrifying bursts of violence and dry pragmatic irony both seem genuinely and credibly part of his reality. It’s a London stage debut, and a tremendous one. A word too for Corey Johnson, the most moving, awkwardly dignified Mitch I have yet seen.

 
Tough stuff, and though well over three hours – you stagger out on to the Cut just before eleven, all passion spent – it never fails to grip. There is a crashing, alarming rock soundscape by Paul Arditti with music by Alex Baranowski: contemporary too, but not distractingly so. After its marvellous grim A View from the Bridge, the Young Vic’s courageous freshness of vision wins again.
box office http://www.youngvic.org 020 7922 2922 to 19 Sept
supported: Bruno Wang & an anonymous donor

rating five   5 Meece Rating

NB: it will be broadcast live to over 550 UK cinemas and many more worldwide on 16 September as part of National Theatre Live

ALSO NB – Young Vic offers its first day seat lottery: names taken at the box office in person at 5pm with winners (2 seats each) announced at 5.30pm for each evening’s performance and at 1pm (winners announced at 1.30) for matinees.  All tickets in the lottery £20 or £10 for under-26s.

Comments Off on A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE – Young Vic SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

July 29, 2014 · 12:11 am

PORGY AND BESS – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

GERSHWIN’S GRANDEUR:    SPLENDOUR ON THE GRASS

 
From the moment Nicola Hughes wanders onto the stage in the overture, pulls on a strident red dress, sniffs her “happy dust” and flings herself into a Maenad dance of frenzy, we know this is one of the great operatic heroines: the ultimate hot-patootie, bad boy’s moll, the scandal of Catfish Row. Her story is as operatically gripping as any Violetta or Mimi. From the dirt-poor simplicity of 1930’s black America and a novel by D & D Heyward, George and Ira Gershwin conjured up immense harmonic distresses, a tale of tyranny and addiction, sexual obsession, heroism and murder. That songs like “Summertime” and “It ain’t necessarily so” get hoicked out and covered for mere entertainment is almost a pity; with this magnificent production, under the sighing trees and sunset glow of a London park, Timothy Sheader (and musical director David Shrubsole) rightly restore it to its towering emotional grandeur.

 
Almost entirely sung-through – indeed to the point that the brief spoken dialogue sometimes stands out with an added intensity – this version is trimmed and blended until it moves with ferocious momentum, never allowing the musical-theatre indulgence of big showstopping numbers. Indeed when numbers are big enough to win their own applause it feels almost an interruption. What matters is the trajectory of Bess: the flight from justice of her murderous lover, her rescue by the crippled beggar Porgy, her reform, sexual obsession and faltering addiction.

 
Sheader eschews any attempt at a literally picturesque shoreside village and sets it on a bare stage, chairs and tables and fishing-nets becoming boats,doors, beds. This gives Liam Steel’s choreography a wide expressive freedom, the ensemble sometimes forming square choirs, sometimes violently or joyfully mobile, sometimes symbolically still , always serving the narrative momentum. But the huge abstract backdrop by Katrina Lindsay is remarkable: a sort of vast, crumpled shining copper sheet in which you can almost see faces, sensual folds, stitches. Onto this Rick Fisher’s brilliant lighting plot projects the mood: warmly bright before a real sunset at the happy island picnic, hellishly flaming as the brutal Crown returns to claim Bess, pure and silver as faithful Porgy waits and the gospel choir sing to “Doctor Jesus”. It is truly terrifying in the storm. But again, all of this only serves, with pinpoint atmospheric accuracy, the unrolling universal tragedy.

 
Hughes’s Bess is ravishingly sexy, dangerous, troubled, sweet; lured back to the happy-dust by Cedric Neal’s sinister, light-toned pusher Sporting Life (in a bright yellow suit and pink trilby) she evokes both the conflict and horrible relief of succumbing. Rufus Bond’s twisted crippled Porgy raises a shiver with deep-felt basso cries of loneliness, but gains irresistible ungainly charm in his happy selfless love (“I’ve got plenty o’nuttin!”). Mariah is, as you would expect from Sharon D.Clarke, a ferocious matriarch to remember (and model yourself on, at my age). And Philip Boykin as Crown is so satisfyingl, villainously macho that he got a volley of pleased boos at the curtain call, and roars of approval for dropping an ironic curtsey in return.

 
But individual praise seems jarring, however deserved. Because this marvellous production is what it should be: a true ensemble, everyone from the dance-captain to the lighting crew serving the Gershwin genius and the pity and terror of the human condition. Unforgettable.

 

box office 0844 826 4242 to 23 August
rating: five  5 Meece Rating      Male director mouse resized

Comments Off on PORGY AND BESS – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

July 25, 2014 · 7:11 pm

THE NETHER – Royal Court SW1

 

A WORLD FOR THE WICKED

 

 

 

 

It quotes a Roethke poem: “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire..” Indeed it is. In a shiningly hyper-real world suspended in the air, a pretty little girl in a Victorian pinafore welcomes a middle-aged man to her storybook bedroom, with dolls’ house and rocking-chair. Suggestively she strokes a toy and indicates that he can do what he likes to her, including savage murder. “Perhaps you’d like to start with the axe? That usually comes after, but if you’re more inclined that way…” Later, she reassures him “It’s all right, I always resurrect”.

 

 

 

 

 

For she is not real,nor is the room itself: perfect in glassy detail, a shining box framed in screen-saver foliage. We have watched this elegant period house and its inhabitants seem to form, shimmering, from grids and lines: a virtual paradise for paedophiles, complete in sound, touch, smell. The Internet has evolved into “The Nether”, where businesses, educations and fantasies flourish . Wealthy people can even afford to “cross over” opting for life-support and life entirely in these unreal worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, before returning to daily reality men like this can be avatars doing unspeakable things, “without consequence”. Below the “screen” – live actors seeming unreal – a detective at a bare table “inworld” is interrogating the patriarchal, pompous businessman “Papa” who creates and hosts this exquisite child brothel, demanding where he hides the server.

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, once again the Royal Court is chilling our spine (its Let the Right One In vampire-fest is running in the West End). But Jennifer Haley’s 80-minute thriller is not after mere sensation, but proves one of the most stunningly intelligent, important and brilliantly executed pieces of the year. Co-produced with Headlong and designed by Es Devlin, it makes brilliant visual use of the idea of virtuality, with the perfect floating world forming and fading above the grim interrogation table. Jeremy Herrin directs a text so understatedly strong that every line and gesture builds intensity. Papa is Stanley Townsend, bluff and defiant; the tense troubled interrogator is Amanda Hale, Ivanno Jeremiah is an undercover investigator – or is he? – and David Beames is a nervy, puzzling, unhappy customer. On opening night the child was played by Zoe Brough: a professional debut of unnerving assurance. She is not, by the way, required to undress beyond long Victorian pantaloons, or to do or say anything unduly troubling. Except perhaps about the axe. That the whole situation is troubling – and that she is in fact a complex sequence of computer code – is is a paradox we are drawn towards, fascinated, horrified, questioning.

 

 

 

 

 

Its strength is in those very topical questions: how far can we police imagination? Should we cavil when imagination can be fed with such realism? How wrong is it to indulge and encourage cruel and horrible fantasies if there is no “inworld” consequence? Is it corrupting, or better than loosing such desires in the real world? It is not only paedophilia we should think about: not far from you now, the odds are that some fresh-faced 12-year-old is happily shooting ‘whores‘ in a game like Grand Theft Auto. As Papa says “porn drives technology” – always has, ever since 19c dirty photos. His codes, motivated by awful urges, are now so advanced and effective in their realism that he suspects the law-envorcers of “stealing them to sell to Disney”.

 

 

 

Serious sci-fi has always had this ability to ask big philosophical questions, and Haley does it with finesse and humanity. She also provides two tremendous, unexpected twists towards the end. Who can ask more?

 

 

 

box office 0207 565 5000 to 9 August
Sponsor: Coutts
Rating: five    5 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on THE NETHER – Royal Court SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

July 4, 2014 · 2:27 am

THE CRUCIBLE – Old Vic, SE1

THE GATES OF HELL CREAK OPEN…

 

It will haunt the memory for months, this profound, dark-lit, smoke-scented deep-booming production of Arthur Miller’s play. In the round arena it creates a ring of pity, guilt and judgement: the physically intense direction of Yael Farber makes Salem’s crazy diabolic terror rise again, as fresh as yesterday and as threatening as tomorrow. No need for updating: not in a world where women are murdered by their own families for marrying or converting, confessions are beaten out of suspects and even our milder law sees malicious denunciation, false memory, and a lust for scapegoats.

 

Miller wrote that when he approached the idea of expressing 1950’s McCarthyism through the 17c Salem witch trials, the “story’s lines of force were still tangled”. But that very tangling enriches the play. John Proctor (Richard Armitage in a commanding performance) has slept with the maid Abigail; when her hysterical accusations threaten his wife Elizabeth with the gallows, he fights with desperate self-reproach, and only through final degradation walks upright into dawn and death. That private tragedy, and the pair’s progress from delicate marital adjustment to terror, are given breathless intensity by Armitage and a fine-drawn Anna Madeley as his wife. But the wider tangle matters as much. Complex political, social and psychological subtleties jab at the sorest places in any society.

 

The action is driven by the religious witch-hunt, spreading beyond the village’s control: Christopher Godwin makes Judge Hathorne a striking-cobra of a man. But Miller underpins the ludicrous fanaticism about dolls and visions with hints of the small things that corrode communities: rows about pigs or lumber, poor crops and infant mortality feeding an instinct to purge and control which ends with orphans wandering the streets, cattle loose, crops rotting. Hard not to think of the Balkans.

 

The speed with which Miller plunges into tension is remarkable. After a sinister opening moment when in near-darkness the slave Tituba circles the stage with a smoking cauldron: soup or diabolic incense, depending on credulity. Then we are in the bedroom with Betty in a swoon, the other girls turning their evasive schoolgirl guilt into infectious hysteria, and the suspicion of witchcraft rapidly inflated by Rev.Hale, the pompous theological terrier with books where the very devil is “caught, defined, calculated”. Adrian Schiller as Hale is particularly impressive even in a cast as strong as this, his gradual loss of face and conviction dwindling him to remorse and horror before our eyes.

 

But the strength of this majestic, perfectly judged production lies in faithful perspective and contrast. After the first hysteria the Proctors in their kitchen provide a glimpse of sane, if uneasy, normality as they reach towards one another, trying without words to forget the adultery, laying the foundation of the heartrending closeness of their final prison moments. As for the ‘children’, girls led by the jilted Abigail in jerking, shouting, hair-tossing accusatory seizures, they display all the bodily ferocity which is this director’s trademark: somewhere between St Trinian’s and Bacchantes. Abigail is Samantha Colley: all glaring black-browed control, her decision to deploy her only weapon visibly growing from the moment she is rejected by her lover after a yearning “I have a sense for heat, John! you are no wintry man…” This ticking bomb is finally detonated by the fussy reproofs of the clerics, but Farber allows us brief levity as male horror at Betty’s faint is set against the calm of Goody Nurse (“She’ll wake when she’s tired of it!”). In this small but pivotal part Ann Firbank is unforgettable, a small pool of sanity amid the chaos.

 

Soutra Gilmour’s design is a masterpiece of smoky atmosphere, and Richard Hammarton’s soundscape cracks open Hell itself. But above all the beauty of Miller’s lines is relished, explored, set like jewels. “An everlasting funeral marches around your heart..” ”I have signed seventy-two death warrants, my hand shakes still, as with a wound”. Or the final admission of Proctor that he finds in himself “a shred of goodness. Not enough to weave a banner with”. But do weave one for this unstinting, profound production. It does honour both to Miller and to the Old Vic.

box office to 13 Sept
Supported: Bank of America Merrill Lunch / CQSspace/ pwc
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE CRUCIBLE – Old Vic, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

July 1, 2014 · 12:02 am

GREAT BRITAIN Lyttelton, SE1

ONE PLAY MANY TARGETS –  CAN BEAN & HYTNER  HACK IT….?

 

 

The headlines flash up, perfect front pages on the glass walls which morph from newsroom to police station or private redoubts: IS YOUR VICAR ON GAYDAR? blares the tabloid end, and MERKEL MIRACLE MUM-T0-BE. IMMIGRANTS CAN’T SPELL in a dozen variants adorns the Daily Wail, and The Guardener boasts a killer slogan “We think so you don’t have to”.

 

Beneath them the surging human players – journalists, police, politicians – enact with deadly energy a farce for today. A roaring editor demands more “Scum” stories , slaps down a reporter’s ovarian cancer story with “This is a newspaper, not a Well Woman clinic”, and on Europe issues barks “Gemma, find a boffin who can prove that Brussels sprouts cause AIDS”. A scavenger is sent to check celebrity rubbish, a scruffy figure pops in to sell Gazza’s laptop and is paid with an instruction to go to Western Union and collect a payment from Mrs Orla Gilhooley, his supposed Granny.

 

The laughs – both cheap shots and brilliant barbs – come thick and fast from the first minute, with reckless energy and gleeful brio. At the heart of it, sleek and ruthless, occasionally turning to us to expound her bleak philosophy of exposure and intrusion, is the News Editor Paige Britain: Billie Piper, evilly irresistible, perfect in every squared shoulder and dangled newsdesk leg..
This is event-theatre: no sooner had the hacking trial ended than Nicholas Hytner announced a preview-free, kamikaze opening of Richard Bean’s secretly completed and rehearsed comedy about a tabloid paper hacking phones, corrupting police and controlling the government. All completely fictional, of course; though there is a red-headed editor who loves horses, is thought of by the billionaire proprietor as a daughter , and remains (genuinely, and ludicrously) unaware of how her news editor is getting all this stories. She even pushes for a “Kieron’s Law” against paedophiles . Oh, and later on the c**t-mouthed ex-editor (Robert Glenister, ranting for England) becomes the PM’s spin-doctor; and the proprietor is trying to buy ITV and shaft the BBC, and the Crown Prosecution Service chief is a humourless female taunted by Piper with “Ooh, a successful woman, you must have been on Woman’s Hour”.

 

Cheekier still, when the proprietor is finally hauled before the Select Committee he complains about not having lunch with “this is the hungriest day of my life”.
What Bean has created , though, is a kaleidoscope rather than a roman-a-clef. Into it he hurls extra bright chips – parliamentary expenses,Youtube parodies, selfies, even a fake-sheikh. The early pleasure, enhanced by Hytner’s generally speedy direction (though it may lose a few minutes as the run goes on) is that in the first half at least Bean lets us enjoy the sheer energy and excitement of a rufty-tufty newsroom, and amuses us with gloriously politically incorrect sideshows. Aaron Neil is a hilariously dim gay Asian Metropolitan Police Commissioner, himself hacked and blackmailed for cheating on his civil partner with a Welsh-Chinese constable. His new Met slogan “Working Together Today To Make Tomorrow A Bit Better Than Yesterday” had some of us choking with unkind laughter.

 

Satisfaction of a different sort awaits in the second half , as with some skill Bean darkens the picture: first with a brief cameo of a family ripped apart by mutual suspicion because they don’t know it was hacking that betrayed the dying daughter, and then with a virtuoso outburst from Paige’s lover: the Deputy Commissioner (Oliver Chris) in which he realizex the full horror of one, central, story she masterminded. It steers just this side of tastelessness.

 

But with remarkable honesty the play makes clear how much sheer bad luck set the Leveson-and-trial machinery in motion. If the crime had been solved and victims saved by hacking, things could have been different. You’ve got to laugh. But why not? It’s a comedy, a good one and a triumph of cheek for the NT. And for Hytner’s ability to prevent 26 actors and a huge technical crew from letting the cat out of the bag before m’learned friends had finished with the Brookses…
box office 0207 452 3000 to 23 Aug Sponsor: Travelex

rating: five. The fifth is for pure opportunist cheek   5 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on GREAT BRITAIN Lyttelton, SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

June 17, 2014 · 11:55 pm

HOBSON’S CHOICE – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

BY ‘ECK, IT’S BRIGHOUSE ROCKING INTO THE ‘SIXTIES…

 
Never underestimate a young woman in a neat blue dress from anywhere North of Watford. Especially one called Maggie. One glare, and bullies like old Hobson grumblingly cede their ancient sovereignty, while meek lads like Willie Mossop accept the stern judgement “I’ve got my work cut out, but you’ve the makings of a man about you!”. Bygone ministers may sigh in strangely affectionate recognition…

 
Not that the tease is deliberate: just an incidental pleasure in Nadia Fall’s rousing updating of the Harold Brighouse play about a tyrannical drunken widower ruling over a Salford bootmaker’s shop in the 1880’s. He keeps his three daughters in servitude until the eldest rebels, orders the talented junior boot-maker Willie to marry her, sets up a rival shop to take his best customers, and with a sharp smalltown legal plot liberates her younger sisters to marry their own lads . It’s a well-loved play – and film – but Fall has given it new life and irony by updating it to the 1960’s, another time of social change and female rebellion.

 
Ben Stones’ set, the boot-shop revolving to the street and humble cellar where the newlywed Mossops set up shop, is detailed: but its edges are ragged, ruinous, shading into heaps of bricks, a metaphor for a crumbling way of life. Two theme songs wind in and out occasionally, with the same message of change: Mark Benton’s domineering, pot-bellied old rascal belts out Sinatra, the young ones in their miniskirts twist to Gerry and the Pacemakers. Nice.

 
And goodness, it’s funny: sharp Lancashire humour and crushing put-downs from Maggie are played with fabulous, faultless, dominating energy by Jodie McNee. Her wooing scene is matchless, with initial cowering terror from her swain (“I’m engaged to Ada Figgins!” “Then you’ll get loose of her!” shading to “I’m resigned. You’re growing on me, lass!”.) Karl Davies hilariously conveys Willie’s progress from semi-literate cowed boothand to rising businessman under her tutelage. The pair work beautifully together, with a sudden wedding-night virginal softness and, in Willie’s final confrontation with old Hobson, a transformative moment. As t he contradicts even his fierce wife, across her face spreads a marvellous triumphant grin: at last she’s made him a man worth having. Worth wearing that penny brass wedding-ring for.

 
Benton is a treat too: blustering, losing his grip to alcoholism, ranting against his daughters half- Lear half-Falstaff as he sits reduced to dressing-gown, underpants and a single sock-suspender. He succumbs. Who wouldn’t? But like Falstaff he gets some of the best lines, especially against lawyers. And the whole ensemble is joyful around these three: magic moments include Jordan Metcalfe the uppity solicitor embarrassingly forced by Maggie’s magnetic authority to push a handcart of rag-and-bone furniture “in broad daylight down the streets of Salford!”, and Kate Adler as Ada Figgins threatening to set her Mum on Willie if he jilts her.
In high good humour and throwaway wisdom, here to shame the soppy south is the rising North of all ages: the cobbled quintesscence, the ecky-thumpessence of business nous and female ferocity which made it great. A gorgeous evening.

 

box office 0844 826 4242 to 12 July

Rating:  five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on HOBSON’S CHOICE – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

June 13, 2014 · 10:21 pm

A SIMPLE SPACE – Udderbelly, SE1

BEAUTIFUL BODIES, JOY IN ACTION

 

In circus tradition feats of acrobatic daring and balance are hyped up by a ringmaster – drumrolls, pleas to keep totally quiet lest you distract them, portentous announcements that this is the “first ever” attempt at a triple backflip or whatever. This Australian troupe of seven, called “Gravity and Other Myths” , do have drumrolls and sound. The musician occasionally joins them, not least for a super-speed strip skipping competion which leaves one member naked. But only one word is spoken, and not a boast uttered in this extraordinary hour.

 

Joyful as a romping basket of puppies, the five men and two women play, hurtle, leap, swing, climb and defy probability and sense. Their routines – well paced between breathtakingly fast and elegantly, balletically slow – span clowning, dance, and rumbustious party-tricks. For instance, as if a no-hands headstand (there are dozens) was not enough, one member solves a whole Rubik’s Cube while balancing on his head; others balance head-on-head, occasionally with a girl or two attached at some impossible angle to a bare foot; at one point they issue the audience with plastic balls to hurl at them while they adopt still more crazy balancing poses, and find hands to hurl them back. A few of the front row are recruited to lie on their backs while above them – and from nervous hand to hand – one of the young women beautifully balances and stretches, doing the aerial upside-down splits on one hand on a pole. With a smile.

 
But it is the ensemble grace of the troupe all together which captivated me most. They treat one another as gym equipment – trapezes, swings, skipping-ropes, vaulting horses; sometimes they find immense grace, sometimes merrily pile up their confreres in odd-shaped, ludicrous heaps and dance or spin on top of them. Or they toss one another up and down, create a towering arch of humanity, swing one another by leg-and-a-wing like toddlers.

 
The whole hour is a delight, and it is unsurprising that they won the physical-theatre palm at the Adelaide Fringe. But for all the subsequent brilliance my favourite memory is of the opening. All seven dash around, making sudden pyramids or handstands, but each suddenly snapping the one word of the evening in turn. “Falling!” – “Falling” . As each topples rigidly backwards as if in a trust exercise, or dives from a high perch on the shoulders of two others, he or she is deftly, affectionately caught by a companion. It is curiously moving. Beautiful. You leave with a lighter step.
http://www.londonwonderground.co.uk to 6 Jul

then Edinburgh Fringe 1-15 August

rating  five (note the acrobatic fifth mouse)     4 Meece RatingMusicals Mouse width fixed

Comments Off on A SIMPLE SPACE – Udderbelly, SE1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

June 6, 2014 · 12:51 pm

PRESSURE – Minerva, Chichester

A HIGH PRESSURE TRIUMPH , AND A TRIBUTE
It happened seventy years ago so we know the outcome. D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in history – 156,000 men, 6939 vessels, 11590 planes. It was also the most astonishingly well-kept secret, and the moment when most lives – and the freedom of Europe – hung on nail-biting meteorological calculations: precise tidal, sea-state and visibility had to be found on one intensely planned day. On a coast where, as the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg despairingly points out, you get days when “At ten o’clock the beach is packed – and by twelve there’s howling wind and rain, and the Punch-and-Judy man’s packed up”.

 

We know that Operation Overlord succeeded, after being postponed one day on advice from Stagg, and that this saved thousands of lives and many tanks and guns from flat-bottomed craft which would have capsized on the 4th. We know that only a brief (and daringly predicted) window of calm Channel weather between gales allowed the fleet to sail to success. Yet despite that hindsight, for two and a half hours my heart hammered and tension chilled my neck. Author David Haig and director John Dove have created a play for Chichester and the Royal Lyceum which, should long outlive this commemorative summer.

 

For there is jeopardy, and powerful personalities within the utility bleakness of the Portsmouth HQ where Eisenhower and the service chiefs gather before great synoptic charts hauled up at six-hour intervals. Haig himself plays Stagg, and superbly: precise, a touch geeky, awed by responsibility (“I’m a scientist not a gambler”) , and nicely uncomfortable in the too-long trousers of a RAF group-captain’s uniform “I’ve never been near a plane”. Malcolm Sinclair is a powerful Eisenhower, and Laura Rogers as Kay Summersby his British driver and, in the stress of war, girlfriend. Ike’’s favoured , pally US forecaster Irving P Krick is Tim Beckmann, scornful of the Brit to the point of contempt: refusing to believe in Stagg’s jetstream theory he reads the isobars with insouciant confidence that the Azores High will keep D-Day calm. Their early conflict is fiery, the increasing honest despair of Stagg profoundly moving. We see Eisenhower’s awesome sense of responsibility alleviated by quiet moments sharing a rare orange with Summersby; we see Stagg in near-breakdown as his wife – with , ironically, high blood pressure – is near a dangerous birth. Subtly, we are reminded that not only was three-day forecasting rare and tricky in 1944, but that women often died with pre-eclampsia.

 

So there are personal dramas; but a finely judged script, with occasional evocative sound effects of bustle or storm outside – resists the temptation to movie soapiness and treats them with subtlety. We are never allowed to forget how many other tragedies hang in the balance, and how many will be lost even in victory. Add the tension of science: when Haig and his colleague scribble and repeat pressure readings at heartbeat speed, you bite your lip. I love synoptic charts and have drawn them on small boats, in anxiety: but even if isobars and tropospheric windspeeds are Greek to you, the pressure will hit you in the neck.

 

So will the unique tension of a war room. When Stagg collapses in trembling panic in the small hours – few slept in those last three days – Summersby maternally pulls him together, reminding us of servicewomen’s emotional contribution, which must have helped many. And Haig has the nerve not to leave us on an obvious triumph high: a deeply affecting, morning-after anticlimax is probably truer to the reality of those bare, tired rooms. I hope our national attention-span is longer than this brief D-Day commemoration: this play deserves a long afterlife.
box office 01243 781312 to 28 June . Sponsor: PALL Corporation
rating five    5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on PRESSURE – Minerva, Chichester

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

June 4, 2014 · 11:14 pm

CLARENCE DARROW – Old Vic SE1

ONE GREAT PERFORMER’S TRIBUTE TO ANOTHER
The main causes of crime, said the famous American defence lawyer Darrow, are “Poverty, ignorance, hard luck and, generally, youth”. A century later, as Kevin Spacey speaks them in the Old Vic’s round arena, the words fall sharp as ever on the city sprawling around us. So do his strictures against the tyrant’s favourite crime, “conspiracy”, and his rage at racism. David Rintels‘ biographical one-man play may be about long-ago murders and workers’ rights in the USA, but even within our shores there are enough echoes and universals to thrill. Across a murderous world of mad laws and extreme punishments, they resonate still more.

 
And it is indeed a thrilling evening. Darrow is most famous globally for two cases. One was saving the teenage killers Leopold and Loeb from the gallows in 1924, commuting it to life imprisonemnt. It was one of his most controversial defences, based wholly on a passionate lifelong opposition to the death penalty. The other, more comically, was his victory in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey trial” where with deadly ridicule he helped to bring down the Butler Act, which had forbidden the teaching of Darwinian evolution theory in state schools.

 
But these – and his shiveringly tremendous defence of a negro family besieged by a racist mob – come in the second part. Before that we learn of his beginnings, his abolitionist and suffragist parents and the dramatic fascination of a law career. It took him first into battles over the working conditions of Pennsylvania miners, some mere children, who asked only a twelve-hour limit to their day and a bare wage. He nearly torpedoed his career, though, when his union allies turned against him. He was prosecuted himself, seemingly on a faked charge, after he persuaded the MacNamara bombers to plead guilty to save their lives rather than attempt an impossible defence and risk their necks.
Spacey has played a role based on Darrow here before, in Inherit The Wind. Here he gives us the old man alone: emphatic and confidential, angry and dryly rueful, self-accusing and self-aggrandizing in turn. Here’s a shining rhetorician haunted by the horror of the rope, a dissenter believing in no deity but human decency and mercy in a messy world. In a lovely aside he wanders the aisles explaining how to pick a jury: on no account accept any “Presbyterian with a tightly rolled umbrella”, and always trust Methodists over Baptists. Apparently “they’re nearer to the soil”.

 
Spacey admits that he has never before done a solo play, and never performed in the round. Under Thea Sharrock’s direction, though, quite apart from the power of the piece he gives us (assisted only briefly by sound-effects) one of the most impressive of technical performances. He is audible, whether in rant or quiet nuance; gives every angle of seating a chance, his shoulders almost as expressive as his face. As intimate with the audience as Darrow with jurors, he is also creditably “on” his props. Which is no mean feat, as he riffles apparently absently through chaotic boxes and drawers to pull out the right photograph bang on cue, or move a chair or stool to represent an invisible witness as he re-enacts interrogations.

 
It will be one of Kevin Spacey’s last performances in this famous theatre, which his determination and persistence brought back to shining life. A modest short run, yet this and the memory of his Richard III should make us grateful enough. America has lent us, these past 11 years, a magnificent throwback to the days of the great actor-managers.

 
box office 0844 871 7628 to 15 June Sponsor: Bank of America Merrill Lynch
In-the-round sponsor: theCQSspace
rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on CLARENCE DARROW – Old Vic SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

June 2, 2014 · 10:45 pm

A HUMAN BEING DIED THAT NIGHT – Hampstead, NW3

DEATH , TRUTH,  TORMENT : THE REBIRTH OF A NATION

 

“What” asks the calm academic , “should our attitude be to people who have committed atrocities?”. From Belfast to the Balkans, Syria to South Africa, the problem is perennial. How can you judge and acknowledge torture and murder without corroding your own nature with hatred? How forgive without forgetting or belittling horrors? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a South-African born Harvard psychologist who returned to her homeland to work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, warns against too saintly a response. “To fail to judge the perpetrators may feel like kindness. But it is treating them as less than human”.

 
Her book about an extraordinary series of interviews with the police officer Eugene de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil” is the basis of this intense and tightly drawn short play by Nicholas Wright. From a brief conference-room opening we are led in silence, as she was, round a cage of black iron bars where de Kock sits, shackled. The light streams from some unseen skylight, the only splash of colour his orange prison uniform. Much of the conversation is verbatim, from Pumla’s tapes and Commission reports.

 

It is riveting, horrifying, and finally illuminating: Jonathan Munby’s unobtrusive direction holds all the drama within the pair’s words and their telling, expressive body-language. Nomo Dumezweni is tautly professional, betraying inward shakings with tight control; Matthew Marsh as the former covert “counter-insurgency” cop and torturer seems at first unnervingly ordinary, a middle-manager with old-fashioned chivalry towards the woman. He grows in stature, ironically, the more he reveals how and why he did terrible things, including random “pre-emptive” murders of black people suspected of being potential rebels. Terrible things, I should say, which are described just enough to make the point , but not (as lesser authors might) dwelt upon pruriently.

 
De Kock’s journey is no facile one: he rants against those who, equally guilty, testified against him, and the clean-handed politicians who gave the orders which steeped him in blood. He builds a hideously comprehensible picture of being an Afrikaner cop in the years of white paranoia, fed by ANC militancy and that weird communal denial which is hard to imagine unless you lived there. “White South Africans had to sleep peacefully in bed – they were happy to be protected, and didn’t care how”. This is true: I lived there for two years as a young teenager, and even from those early 1960’s well remember the sense of hysterical dread of black insurrection, mingled with denial of the overarching injustice of apartheid.

 
But de Kock, like others, did fearful things and got used to them. Under Pumla’s quiet insistence we watch his conscience seeping slowly through the professional reminiscence: faces of the dying swim before him, moments of horror when he is forced to see that the “enemy” are not the crazed Communist monsters he was taught to fear and hate. Marsh’s performance is stunningly real; opposite him Dumezweni too goes through painful changes, forced to cast off her academic determination not to feel. It is as if this 85-minute experience distils and condenses that extraordinary process of South African reconciliation, with all its anger and all its hope. When de Kock ends his final anecdote with a blurted, choking “A human being died that night” you feel, with a shock, that one was born, too.

 
Box office 020 722 9301 to 21 June http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on A HUMAN BEING DIED THAT NIGHT – Hampstead, NW3

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

May 22, 2014 · 5:00 pm

MISS SAIGON – Prince Edward Theatre, W1 : and a guest reviewer

POWERFUL, EMOTIONAL, CHALLENGING – 

GUEST REVIEWER    JOHN PETER  WRITES: 

Do you remember Vietnam?   How, in the sixties and seventies, we
wondered whether the communist North would invade the free-living South?
In Washington, President Kennedy said that, in the end, the people of
Vietnam should decide that themselves.  His bullish successor, Lyndon
Johnson, went for war.  Young Americans sang ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids
have you killed today?’
Boubil and Schoneberg’s heartrending MISS SAIGON is an opera: vast,
brilliant, thrilling and moving.    It is also a drama and a great moral –
political-erotic question.   Who are we? the Vietnamese ask. What do
we want? Who can we believe?  What is The American Dream?  What will
it be like when we wake up?
The brilliant dancing in Laurence Connor’s production may look
like high-precision sexual entertainment, but it is more than that.     I
have never seen so many beautiful girls demonstrating what their
delicate-looking but also athletic bodies can give to hungry men: yes,
but it is also an exhibition of hope. We will always be here, we are yours,
you are ours: this is our world.
Eva Noblezada is Miss Saigon, a sensual but delicate and kind
young woman, a passionate mother and a proud Vietnamese, proud but modest.
Alistair Brammer is Chris, a man who loves in body and heart: a gentleman
and a disciplined soldier.  It is time for him to visit Chekhov and Ibsen,
don’t you think?
It is time to give more respect to what we call the Musical.
Like opera, it is drama in which music joins words, creates
and drives words, to speak to us.

I saw MISS SAIGON 25 years ago.    It was powerful, emotional, challenging, even poetic.   Laurence Connor’s production is the same, but even more so.   I thought then that this musical – opera will stay with
us.   It has.
box office 0844 482 5155

rating:  five   5 Meece Rating

 

 

Comments Off on MISS SAIGON – Prince Edward Theatre, W1 : and a guest reviewer

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

May 16, 2014 · 12:45 am

AN AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY LARK – Playhouse, Oxford, & TOURING

INTIMATE, HUMBLE: THE BEST COMMEMORATION

 

The title comes from Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV, evoking the rural England of 1914 as young men queued, as if at a football match, to enlist. A novelty, an adventure, heralding not only their individual deaths but that of an old world – of “farthings and sovereigns/ dark-clothed children at play called after kings and queens /Never such innocence, never before or since…” After the brittle dated cynicism of Oh What a Lovely War Deborah McAndrew’s play for Northern Broadsides and the New Vic feels like a humbler, stronger, more decent commemoration of WW1. Its tour continues but I hope, before 2018 , it finds its way to London.
It is quintessentially North-Western. Actually, I sometimes wonder why they bothered putting up the Angel of the North at all, when they’d already got Barrie Rutter: founder-seraph of Northern Broadsides, equally ironclad and loomingly gritty. I last saw him roaring demonically in Rutherford and Son under Jonathan Miller: here again he stands at the centre of a community, both directing and playing bluff bossy widower Farrar, squire of the fictional Greenmill Spinners Morris . They’re mill-workers on Wakes Week, preparing for the “Rushcart” festival. This is based on (and the choreographer Conrad Nelson trained by) the real Saddleworth Morris who revived a pre-war tradition. They build a towering house of rushes on a cart and dance it through the streets each year in clog-stamping routines. Farrar has two sons keen to enlist, and a daughter Mary (a gentle, golden Emily Butterfield) who loves young Frank Armstrong. Farrar disapproves, not least because the lad’s mother let her hens raid his flower-garden just when he needed good blooms to decorate his dancing-hat.

 

Thus it begins in playful vein, weedy young Tweddle excoriated as a “daft gobbin”, villagers quarrelling and courting and believing “It won’t touch us up here”. The Morris practises, old Farrar berating nimble Alan for “unnecessary embellishment” and mourning the good old days of Victoria’s Jubilee when things were done properly: good to acknowledge that 1914 had its own nostalgias. In a tremendous, heart-shaking, stampingly united joyful Act 1 finale, with the lasses on fiddle and whistle and accordion, they build and decorate and stamp and sing their Rushcart round the stage in wild floral hats. It gets you in the guts. In Oxford, the very ice-cream seller danced featly down the aisle at the interval.
Such communities were military volunteers: young Ted says “Don’t know what this war’s about but there’s ideas in it, big ideas” and welcomes an escape from the tedium and sicknesses of millwork. The young men come home from training on 48 hours leave for Mary’s wedding: in a striking moment they dance at first blithely, then move to morris stick-work, but the staves become rifles and they march away. Back home the women live on, pregnant, anxious, taking on men’s jobs at the mill. Angry that many will find no husbands, one bitter maiden hands the white feather to shame a young father into filling another grave. Ironically, it’s the same feather they all bickered over when the hens trashed Farrar’s garden: bringing him a peace-offering, Mrs Armstrong tartly observes that she’d let her chickens destroy his flower-garden again “if only I could still live in a world where such things mattered!”
The worst bereavement is met with an utter, unemphatic, wrenching stillness from the patriarch, and the curtain call is
sombre. They sing the Rushcart song quietly once more, as the whole cast in plain clothes bear a banner:
1914
We remember them.

 

box office 01865 305 305 http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ to Saturday
TOURING Derby, Cheltenham, Kingston, Oldham to 24 June    Touring Mouse wide
http://www.northern-broadsides.co.uk in collaboration with New Vic
Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on AN AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY LARK – Playhouse, Oxford, & TOURING

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

May 10, 2014 · 2:34 pm

FLEABAG Soho Theatre W1

AN HOUR OF SHOCKING BRILLIANCE AND ARTISAN OBSCENITY

 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s extraordinary self-written monologue performance won awards in Edinburgh, the Offies, The Stage and the Critics’ Circle – and an Olivier nomination. To my chagrin I missed its previous run, and have been longing to see what got described as “sucker-punch funny…jaw-droppingly filthy..” etc.

 
Having caught the show, I would urge anyone to do the same. It could hardly come at a better moment. Not just because she is crackingly funny – for she often is – or because the character she creates is idiosyncratic: as one promotion coyly says “some sort of a female living her sort of life”, an erratically high-sexed and cynical Bridget Jones for the new century, a failing middle-class cafe owner with a life in chaos. No: the brilliance of the piece is in making it impossible, even during the most hilarious moments of over-sharing (that bloody handprint ..those anal musings..) not to contemplate the bleak sad reality of a human being adrift, in a culture gradually poisoned by unhappy, addictive sexualization.

 
The narrator is an obsessive porn user (“anal. gang bang. mature. asian. teen. milf. facial. fetish.rough..” etc) – as well as being pretty undiscriminating in her real-life encounters, not bothering even with partners’ names most of the time beyond “Tube-rodent” or “Arsehole man” . The deadening, eroding addictiveness of porn is a modern brow-furrowing issue, and so is the objectification of women as sexual playthings. But such is the anxiety about the effect on boys that we are rarely made to consider female obsessions with porn: women internalizing and adopting the role of objects, determined to enjoy it without affection, indeed using their bodies as shields, fearing intimacy, wanting only to be wanted in that one way.

 
Here we have just that: but the story is being told by a likeable, intelligent, educated, funny creature. She could have a decent life, but her life and relationships have been punctured by herself, in the cause of frantic, endless banging and wanking. Between laughs we learn of a family alienated, a business ruined, a best friend grievously betrayed to her very death. A horror.

 
There is a harrowing reveal in the penultimate moments, and a shaft of hope from an unexpected- male – direction referring us on to another alleyway of oversexualized cultural misery. And yet t’s very funny. It is a revealing, brilliant , sorrowful human comedy. I am glad it won all those awards. Here’s another. Though given what happens to the hamster in the story, it feels unwise to entrust Fleabag with so many helpless mice…
box office 020 7478 0100 to 25 may
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on FLEABAG Soho Theatre W1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

April 29, 2014 · 10:16 pm

GROUNDED – Gate, W11

A MOTHER  AND A MODERN MILE-HIGH NIGHTMARE

 

Crop-haired, upright, an Aryan Alpha-female, she stands proud in flying-suit and straps. She’s a USAF fighter pilot, in love with her F16: “It’s the speed, it’s the G-force pressing you back as you near the sky, it’s the ride, my Tiger…it’s the respect, its the danger. The Blue..”. And – no punches pulled – “I have missiles, I have Sidewinders..I rain them down on the minarets and concrete below me, the structures that break up the sand. I break them back down, return them to desert”.

Phew. Christopher Haydon’s production of George Brant’s monologue, with Lucy Ellinson as the Pilot, was a shock hit at the Gate and the Traverse last year, and I was curious to know whether it was as remarkable as reported. It is. More, if anything: Ellinson (who is British) now inhabits the role with frightening completeness, dominating the room from within a gauzy cube. Her androgynous athletic restlessness breathes exultation. She tells, amusedly, how she met her man Eric, the only guy in the bar back home with the nerve to come on to her . Others run “ I take the guy spot and they don’t know where they belong”. So she’s got her “little woman at home I’m fighting for”.

 

She’s funny, she’s frightening, she’s big cocksure America. There is brilliance in the way Ellinson enlists you on her side even as she talks of crumbling Iranian minarets. Maybe it’s the way that when she finds she’s pregnant, she resolves that her girl “Will not be a hair-tosser, a cheerleader, a needy sack of shit”, but will understand the high blue glory. She adores her fragile baby but itches for her work. “I was born for this..but I was born for that, too..” The eternal cry of the working mother.

 

To her horror she is redeployed in the despised “Chairforce”, controlling remote drones miles high over a new war. Stuck in a trailer in Nevada while her man works in Vegas, staring into a screen at grey images from her drone camera, the boredom is broken by occasionally pulling a trigger on ambushes to protect US convoys from ambush. “Military age males…doing something to the road… headset pronounces the males guilty”. Her knuckles whiten as they did in battle, yet she is in no danger. Her perception is dislocated by that paradox: energized and corrupted, she becomes godlike in pride or horrified as heaps of dying humans return to grey “as their thermal readings cool”. Home life becomes the problem. The Odyssey, she says with a return of her old dryness, would be a different book of Odysseus came back every day to his family.

 

The mental journey eases and sharpens in turn, her marriage shakes. Brant’s script is cunning in theatrical legerdemain: rather than just gasping with easy horror at the cruel strangeness of remote warfare – though God knows the inhumanity is always before us – we find ourselves watching its psychological effect on one flier, one woman, one mother. The general horror and the private stress come together at last, climactically. Unforgettably.

 

box office 020 7229 0706 to 30 May

Rating: five    5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GROUNDED – Gate, W11

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

April 17, 2014 · 6:32 pm

HANDBAGGED – Vaudeville, WC2

WHO NEEDS JURASSIC PARK? RE-LIVE THE 80s WHEN THATCHER ROAMED THE EARTH
She’s back, the Iron Lady, with a war-cry of “No!” and a warmly patronizing memory of “The men!…I can pin them wrigging with my gaze and release them with a smile”. Baffled but courteous, the Queen creeps up behind her to offer a chair for their weekly meeting. And we’re off: piquantly, the most insightful political comedy to hit the West End for years is not born of the Westminster village or the boys-club standup nexus. It’s written by Moira Buffini, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and played by women outnumbering men two-to-one.

 

Not that it’s a feminist plea – its twin heroines would never stand for that. Rather – drawing on speeches, memoirs, news reports, Christmas broadcasts and (not least) Buffini’s mischievous imagination – it is a playful and unexpectedly humane treatment of eleven years which Prime Minister Thatcher shared with H.M. the Queen.
Playful because there are two of each: one younger, 1980s version, another as they are or would be today. They argue with one another and with their other selves, as in a four-way melée of differing perceptions as they recall like Zimbabwe, the Falklands, bombings, riots, and the Special Relationship. Joining them, henpecked, are jobbing actors hired to conjure up the other characters from Denis and Philip to Kaunda, Enoch,Kinnock, Reagan, HoweHeseltine. The playfulness lies in the idea that they have met in a theatre (to the Queen’s faint chagrin, though “one saw War Horse”) and that the footmen-actors – Jeff Rawle as the older, Neet Mohan as the younger – occasionally jib at parts they are given or break out with their own opinions. So two generations can identify, and the odd in-joke flourish (“What was a Closed Shop?” asks the youth, and Rawle snarls “The reason actors used to earn proper money!”. Naturally, any male rebellion is futile against the basilisk stare of Thatcher and the amused authority of the monarch. The Queen, by the way, insists on an interval despite the PM’s protest “there’s work to do!”.

 

Likenesses go far beyond wigs and suits: Fenella Woolgar in particular has caught a particular eyebrow-move which took me right back to 1980 with a shiver, and Marion Bailey as the older Queen goes beyond caricature into a degree of identity previously only caught by Helen Mirren. In which context it is worth mentioning The Audience because its weakest scene was the Thatcher one. This more than makes up the deficit.
In my last doomed week as Times Chief Theatre critic this show proved great solace at the Tricycle. My review (£ http://tinyurl.com/nb9el4g) concluded “Pure theatre, doing something only theatre can.”. Glad to return the favour: six months on, the well-deserved transfer has that very quote outside.

 

One of the pleasures of seeing it again is noticing how subtly it accepts the two women not as Spitting Image caricatures but as living, struggling humans. “Journalists and policemen are always so BIG” muses the Queen “One finds them enormous”. And I had forgotten the moment when the Chequers Christmas gathering (with Murdochs and Archers) watches the defiant 1981 Christmas message with horror as HM recklessly uses the word “comradeship”…

 

It’s political, and historical, yet universal in its vision of two people finding one another baffling but occasionally sharing empathy (as when they reflect on the risk of assassination). Lightly, truthfully, it shows how a great public role can only partly define you; how the years go by, and within each of us is a scornful younger self and a thoughtful future one. Don’t miss it. It’s a treat.
box office 0845 505 8500 to 28 June

rating:   even better, so 5  5 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on HANDBAGGED – Vaudeville, WC2

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

April 17, 2014 · 8:40 am

HENRY IV PART 1 – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

BOOZE AND BATTLE, GRACE AND HUMANITY          The Bard Mouse width fixed

 

The tale of troubled Henry, threatened by rebellion, haunted by guilt at Richard’s murder and exasperated by the follies of his son Hal, is one of the great Shakespearean chronicles. Wild Hal, warlike Hotspur and the irresistibly disgraceful Falstaff shine vivid down the centuries. The play is rich in magnificent, eloquent insults: bed-presser, bull’s pizzle, stockfish! Mad-headed ape, whoreson greasy tallow patch, vile standing-tuck! Between those and the tremendous battle scenes it has an honourable record of being the route by which a crafty parent introduces a restless boy to the History plays: a comedy, a ripping yarn.

 

Greg Doran directs as ever with a lovely clarity and humour, never flagging but not hurrying either. Just over three hours with the interval, this production gives even the smallest character space and time to breathe and expand. There is of course Antony Sher’s Falstaff : who when he claps on a leather hat above his capacious overcoat, has the air of a large ambulating mushroom sprouting curly grey fungus of beard and hair. Falstaff’s baseness is not dodged or lightened as it sometimes has been. Sher, in a slow rich slur, gives full value to the fat knight’s Just-William talent for fantasy and excuse, and we laugh with him as he fences with the less adept young Prince.

 

But when he boasts of his earnings from frightened citizens with his press-gang protection racket, filling his military company with the dregs of prison and gutter who can’t pay, Doran gives us something startling. Behind Falstaff and his handcart picnic files a dim-lit parade of shuffling and staggering figures. He shrugs that they will fill graves as well as any, shrugs at other deaths with no intention of dying himself, a sociable sociopath – “I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter had – give me life!”. His sermon about the uselessness of honour – which can be done with quiet intelligent horror as Roger Allam did at the Globe – is chucked out by this old bastard as just another canting fantasy. Insouciant selfishness goes too far: when Hal finds, mid-battle, that it’s a bottle in his friend’s holster, not a pistol, the lad’s visible frustration suddenly feels like one of the subtle, important, corners of the play : it foreshadows the rejection he will inflict on the old man in Part II.

 

But there are many such corners and hints in Alex Hassell’s closely built performance as Hal: his head hung in shame at his father’s rebukes, his impatience with idleness – “The land is burning!”‘ and his sudden, boyish plea for peace or single-combat after he has seen the state of Falstaff’s half-dead soldiery. Trevor White’s Hotspur, on the other hand, turns no corners and never changes: he is played white-blond, pale-eyed, a hypermanic Roundhead to Hal’s sensual cavalier. He leaps and punches the air and yells “Yesss!” and in a terrifyingly arranged fight (arranger Terry King surpasses himself) at one stage is belabouring Hal with both swords at once, crazy-manic and fearless. This is not a likeable Hotspur, not least when he hurls around his imploring wife. Some will mourn his lack of heroic seriousness, but it is credible: he’s very young.

 

Doran’s pace and shaping of the play is superb. Great humour shades to seriousness. Hotspur’s baiting of the Druidically solemn self-satisfied Glendower (Joshua Richard, very New Age ) quietens as Nia Gwynne sings in Welsh to a gentle harp. Hotspur scorns and insults the singing, not knowing it will be his dirge. The roll-on tavern scenes are fun, with Paola Dionisotti giving a sharp Dot-Cottonish Quickly, Joshua Richards a pricelessly laconic Bardolph and Elliott Barnes-Worrell haring around beautifully in waiterly panic as Francis. But even as Sher in his slow-spoken querulous pomp weaves Falstaff’s web of fantastic excuses, we cut to King Henry: almost weeping with frustration and remorse, gasping out his longing to atone the murder, the words “Holy Land” snatching his very breath.

 

Clouds scud overhead or hang as smoke over the open fields of England (a tangle of bare branches against blue, glimpsed behind the battered barnlike back wall). The final battles are action-movie stuff, Douglas the crazed Scotsman flailing some sort of murderous Celtic shillelagh, flashes and smoke and crashing across the vast room. Jerks of compassion as Hal kneels by his dead rival and thinks to mourn Falstaff are diffused as the fat one rolls upright and desecrates Hotspur’s corpse (oh yes, this is no jolly Falstaff, not after a while). The whole thing is masterly: with intense, scholarly, humane concern and care Doran teases out spirit and character , finds nuggets of meaning and sorrow. This, and Part II (review follows) will be live in cinemas and streamed into schools. Such permanence is well-earned.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 6 September
Part I in participating cinemas 14 May

rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on HENRY IV PART 1 – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

April 13, 2014 · 10:53 am

INCOGNITO – Hightide Festival Halesworth

HIGHTIDE WINS A DAZZLING PAYNE PREMIERE
O happy conversion! It is awkward and gloomy for a critic to admire and acknowledge a play’s clever originality, yet privately feel nothing. Nick Payne’s much-praised Constellations had had this effect on me: neither the cosmology and beekeeping nor the love story hit home. I liked his Blurred Lines very much though, and admired the more conventional The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar, so I settled to this premiere with hope. Even though the set – shining vague scaffolding – was ominously reminiscent of the white balloon ceiling of Constellations.

 

The hope is fulfilled. This is shiningly brilliant, a meditation on neuroscience, memory, deception, heredity and identity: alive with compassion and wonder, streaked with intelligent humour. It interweaves three stories. There is the 1955 obsession of the pathologist Thomas Stolz Harvey who annexes and dissects the brain of the dead Albert Einstein to try and find his genius. There is the story, powerfully affecting, of an early victim of brain surgery, Henry, left with only the shortest-term memory, speaking and understanding in terrible unresolvable circles. And there is a troubled modern-day neuropsychologist, divorced and borderline alcoholic, who falls in love with another woman.

 

Four actors – Alison O’Donnell, Paul Hickey, Amelia Lowdell and Sargon Yelda – play 21 parts over six decades without prop or costume changes, moving between them in seconds with astonishing fludity (superb direction from Joe Murphy.) Payne uses his gift for sharp natural dialogue to drive plot and character forward within the same fragmented, episodic flea-jump style which Constellations exploited, challenging all traditions of chronology and form.

 

If that sounds tough going, astonishingly it is not. You have to concentrate, for the story’s circles are concentric and overlapping, Venn diagrams of ideas and ironies. Again and again Payne circles and returns, breaking and re-forming shapes like the flocks of starlings his Henry character speaks of, sparking ideas and patterns and inspirations like fleeting flashes of electricity across brain-cells. Harvey’s desperation to find the secrets of thought in the dead mush of tissue becomes ever more hopeless; Martha’s daily encounters with amnesiacs – even her envy of them – is counterpointed by her own unwillingness to admit her past memories and encumbrances to her new lover. When the scientist, on the run, enthuses about the brain it is ironically to an audience of self-stupefied young Kansas stoners. Once, a sudden seemingly unconnected violent moment links back to the theme.

 

. All the cast are remarkable, and not only in the speed of change between characters in which two people in conversation barely change posture to leap across decades and personalities. Sargon Yelda’s rendering of Henry’s terrible amnesiac fugue is heartbreaking, its conclusion unexplained but intensely moving. Martha’s cry “We are a blip within a blip in an abyss” is denied by her final moment. It’s a marvellous experience: I felt my own brain expanding and unmooring, chasing hares and moonbeams and mysteries. As Einstein said, knowledge is limited but imagination encircles the world.

 

touring to Newcastle, Oxford North Wall, and Bush London in coming weeks

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on INCOGNITO – Hightide Festival Halesworth

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

April 3, 2014 · 11:22 pm

ANOTHER COUNTRY – Trafalgar Studio 1, SW1

LOVE AND THE TRAITORS:  A 1930 WORLD
There will be voices which hail this revival of Julian Mitchell’s magnificent imagining of the 1930‘s schooldays which bred the Cambridge spies – Burgess, Philby, McLean and Blunt – as yet another opportunity to decry public-schools and establishment toffs, and point fingers quivering with largely irrelevant rage at the present Cabinet. Others, more mildly, will note its importance in the fight for gay acceptance and equality (it is an ‘80s play, and became a groundbreaking film with Rupert Everett in the harsh Section 28 years).
And it certainly does chime powerfully – and now rather joyfully – with the era of gay marriage and equality, as well as saying a lot about a particular clenched , stiff-lipped public school ethos of the “low dishonest decade” still traumatized by the 1914/18 war (another centennial reflection there) as it rolled towards another one. But it would be a pity to nod it through either as a single-issue play or a period piece. Jeremy Herrin’s fine production lets its many layers and subtleties of character breathe into vivid, complex life.

 

This production was conceived at Bath and ran at Chichester’s small Minerva last year: yet in this towering cavernous space it somehow maintains a fly-on-the wall intimacy in Peter McKintosh’s elegantly battered school common-rooms, dormitories and cricket pitch. And the young cast, convincing senior-school prefects and rebels, negotiate its verbal acrobatics and adolescent character confusions beautifully. At Chichester I picked out a brilliant performance by Rob Callender as Bennett, the graceful, languid, mischievous maverick who comes to realize that for him – unlike many of his partners in experimentation – homosexuality is real. Falling in love properly with another boy is not only a joy but a “life sentence” of social exclusion: all the more vivid because he is one of those who sees “Life as a ladder” and looks forward to a lush diplomatic career. Which he won’t get.

 

Bennett is still brilliant, but this time I took in also a strong, clever, nuanced performance by Will Attenborough as the school Communist Judd, some remarkable subtleties from the various prefects and aspirants to the “22” elite, and the fact that Bill Milner as the poor put-upon fag moves with effortless truth between childlike pathos and comic absurdity. I wondered in the opening scenes whether the play – the schoolboy slang, the chatter about the “House Man” and arcane prefectorial politics might be too baffling for a new generation: 1930’s schoolboys are, after all, as distant as the dinosaurs. But the skill of it is in drawing us so close, claustrophobically, into their world so that audience laughter or applause at the interval feels like an intrusion. Even from seats far up.
The interplay between the boys throws up political echoes from every era: not least in odd grace-notes like the moment Judd the Communist consoles the weeping Junior after a school suicide, offering the comfort of political anger: stay furious at the system and you can bear life’s blows better. Mitchell’s wit bites hard both on left and right; Bennett, with his gift for boyish parody, gets the funniest lines but Julian Wadham is wonderful as the visiting Bloomsburyite, all Swinburne and rosy sensuality. And just as you think you are only in a play of ideas and talk, the final emotional hit of Bennett’s “I”ll haunt the whole lot of them” jerks you into history. Terrific.
box office 0844 8717632 / http://www.atgtickets.com     to 21 June
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ANOTHER COUNTRY – Trafalgar Studio 1, SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

March 28, 2014 · 11:29 pm

THERESE RAQUIN – Finborough, SW10

PITY AND TERROR: A PUB PREMIERE OF RARE QUALITY

 

The Finborough has done it again: produced the most remarkable new musical of the year, shudderingly emotional, harsh and passionate, fit to make your hair stand on end. Pulsing recitative, dissonant screams, lyrical yearnings and bitter wit mark a tale set in sombre chiaroscuro, a nightmare made visible. Nona Shepphard, who writes and directs with Craig Adams’ Kurt-Weillish score, describes her newest work as “A radical adaptation”, and so it is.

 

But for all its headlong, fractured form it is also truer to the original than a more ploddingly traditional version. Emile Zola’s 1867 novel is one of the most terrifying tales of conscience and comeuppance in world literature: I remember how the 1980 BBC dramatization scared the bejasus out of us in our first married flat (it seems to have been considered too alarmingly morbid to repeat.) The story is uncomplicated: a domineering mother marries her orphan niece off to her own sickly, selfish son Camille, keeping her pent up, bored and silent, in a cramped shop in the Pont-Neuf. Therese falls in love with Camille’s old schoolfriend Laurent, and they contrive to drown Camille on a boating trip. Persuaded to marry – pretending reluctance – they hallucinate that their marriage-bed is occupied by the corpse, and are driven to madness, hatred and suicide.

 

The tale’s power is in the explosive passion of Therese’s escape from the clawing claustrophobia of her life, to the worse imprisonment of remorse. It breathes he dank clamminess of the dark Seine beyond, Zola’s pitiless view of humans as struggling animals and his obsession with cadavers, humans as bags of bones, blood and tortured nerves. Its deeper horror comes with the fearful detail of the domineering old mother succumbing to paralysis, hearing the truth of Camille’s death and sitting helpless with her murderous eyes fixed on the guilty couple’s endgame.

 

All this power is gathered up by Sheppard’s vigorous lyrics, concentrated and flung at us in two breathless hours. The language is terrific, whether mockingly witty, flickering with passion or steaming with disgust as Therese recoils from her cousin-husband “smelling as stale as an invalid child”. A chorus of “river-women” murmur Therese’s inner thoughts as she stays silent and impassive until her first crazed scream of desire. The mother’s Thursday-night dominoes sessions with dullard friends become a jerking zombie Totentanz of pinched, shrunken faces. Laura Cordery’s design of beams and shelves evokes the claustrophobic world of the shop; Laurent’s search of the morgue is staged with the terrible power of simplicity.
Pity and terror! And if I am slow to mention the cast it is only because they are, rightly, so integral to the overall piece. Julie Atherton is Therese, equally expressive in silent passivity and crazed passion; Jeremy Legat the prating Camille who gains power only as an inescapable corpse, and Ben Lewis a magnificent, alpha-male Laurent. But above all Tara Hugo as Mme Raquin is unforgettable: a pair of dangerous eyes in a gaunt pale face beneath vain elderly curls, a patter of complacency and scream of harsh song. An exposed nerve.

 

box office 844 847 1652   or http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 19 April

Rating: five    5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THERESE RAQUIN – Finborough, SW10

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

March 18, 2014 · 11:28 pm

BLITHE SPIRIT – Gielgud, SW1

ANGELA LANSBURY BACK ON THE BOARDS, IN VERY GOOD COMPANY

It is Angela Lansbury’s hour and ovation, back on the West End stage at 88 after forty years away.  We’d be on our feet out of mere sentiment even if she was just OK:  as it happens she gives a performance of shimmering, seemingly effortless balance, brilliance and comic timing.    Her Madame Arcati won her a Tony on Broadway in 2009 and has clearly not lost impetus.  Probably gained a bit, since you need a proper British heart to understand that a tricky exorcism is best approached by swinging a string of garlic round your head and chirping  “Let’s put our shoulders into it this time, and give it a real rouser!” .

Her strength is that of the finest comic actors who – like all this cast –  understand that you must believe in the utter rationality of your chararacter, as the centre of her own universe and unaware of any absurdity.  The village medium Arcati is too often played as a dotty old bat, obsessed with psychical nonsense, by people with no real idea of what being one would feel like. Lansbury, far from dotty, nonetheless puts herself firmly inside the character:  every offended glare, nod, caper and professional exultation 100% credible and all the funnier for it.   To see her sand-dancing round the room in velvet droopwear covered in cabbalistic gold scrolls and sneakily pausing to adjust her henna hairdo is, on its own well worth the ticket price.

As for Noel Coward’s play, written in 1941 when our heroine was already at drama school,  it wears every bit as well as she does.  Like Private Lives and Design for Living it is brittle on the surface, molten beneath with dangerous emotional truths.  It may seem tiresome to find gay-conflict themes in Coward but it is hard to avoid:   there’s too often a man torn between a passionate, squabbling, morally doomed but irresistible affair and the deep, deep, boring peace of a conventional,  permitted, but sexually dull marriage.  Too open a code to ignore.  Even the secondary characters, the  visiting Bradmans, in a fleeting scene  illustrate the dulling tendency of sensible wives to shut up their husbands and hustle them briskly off.   Here, Charles Edwards’ Condomine,  alternately  fascinated and panicked by the accidental ghostly materialization of his foxy first wife Elvira,   allows glimpses of why married Ruth (Janie Dee).  He needed a Mum.   Dee herself ,  quelling her own innate foxiness,  demonstrates her fitness for the role by even folding a tablecloth with a certain menacing precision.  And when her fury at his flirting with Elvira’s ghost turns into solicitude, she’s Matron all the way.

Elvira is Jemima Rooper,  swishing around in white ghostly eveningwear and a smooth sharp pale bob,  and inhabiting the character’s amoral guttersnipe mischief without any of the irritating little-me cooing which can mar the role.  Costume has nicely distinguished the two women: Janie Dee’s natural foxiness is quelled by an unforgiving Princess Elizabeth perm, her bosom trussed up forbiddingly  in mauve crossover evening dress sans cleavage (even reappearing whitely as a ghost she’s not filmy and drapey like Elvira but in a buttoned-up Burberry and royal headscarf).  Patsy Ferran, getting a dream of a professional debut,  gives the part of Edith the clumsy maid all the mojo it requires;  and Michael Blakemore’s direction – with Coward’s  scene directions projected and the Master’s portrait shone at the end,   gives an old-fashioned air of hommage to the production in the best possible way.

But a last word about Charles Edwards:  always subtler, funnier, more human than you expect,  whether as Andrew Aguecheek, Edward VII or a Tory Chief Whip .  His Condomine is all he should be: smooth but easily put-upon, posturing, petulant, worriedly uncertain of his own feelings (terrified he might really have called up Elvira out of his ‘subconscious’),  easily panicked. A man adrift, a worm fit for the turning.   As he escapes the set’s final satisfying collapse, one wishes him well, poor sap…

box office     0844 482 5130  to  7 June

rating:  five  4 Meece Rating  BUT  the fifth is the first theatrecat award of Costume Design Mouse, to Bill Butler  and Martin Pakledinaz. – Costume design mouse resized

Comments Off on BLITHE SPIRIT – Gielgud, SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

March 5, 2014 · 11:21 pm

GOOD PEOPLE Hampstead Theatre, NW3

CLASS, RACE, LUCK AND LIES:  AMERICAN AND UNIVERSAL

In tough South Boston they approvingly say someone is “Good People”.  It carries a sense not only of individual value but neighbourhood repute: decent family, not hoodlums.   Another expression (used once of the uppity Kennedys) is “lace-curtain Irish”.   Upward mobility can happen, with effort and luck,  but  as in any country not least here,   it does need both.  Not for nothing is our heroine’s only recreation the bingo table, twice staged:   small chances change a life.  Missing school,  a disabled baby,  an uninsured toothache turning bad so you miss work and get sacked and behind with the rent –  and the next stop is the pavement.  Whereas given a good brain, a father who gets you out of trouble and a community homework club, and you might make it to college, upward marriage and middle-class prosperity.

Mike (Lloyd Owen) got out and is now a smart fertility doctor.  Margie, his high-school girlfriend,  didn’t.  As we first meet her, against Hildegard Bechtler’s startlingly realistic back-lot set,  she is a tiny middle-aged firecracker mouthily resisting the sack from the Dollar Store checkout , deploying a mixture of rage, humour and desperation which summons us irrevocably to her side.  For it’s Imelda Staunton,  in one of her finest performances.

Among her friends – an irresistible June Watson as Dottie the landlady with a sideline in appalling craft novelty rabbits,  and Lorraine Ashbourne with a fine slaggy grumpiness –  Margie is a pillar of sensible decency.  When her hope for a job takes her to the doctor’s smart office and then his living-room,   she is combatively, humorously and at last furiously out of place.   “I wouldn’t fit in here…I’m not fancy enough”.     In a week when a British government adviser urged poor kids to learn ease in middle-class environments, it strikes home.  And so in reverse (and in Hampstead!)   does Mike’s discomfort at her view that he has gone lace-curtain and forgotten his roots.  He has certainly edited them:  once Margie discomfitingly reminisces with his  curious graduate wife,   it turns out that selective memory has made his family life tougher and himself holier.

The author, a Pulitzer winner,  says his fellow-American playwrights don’t “tackle class the way Brits do”.  But I can’t think of any recent British work treating it with as much honesty, energy, humour and perceptiveness as David Lindsay-Abaire,  himself a scholarship boy from a “Southie” childhood.  Directed by Jonathan Kent,  this is neither bleeding-heart patronizing nor mired in despair.  The awkwardness, defiance, and shifting power play between Margie, Mike, and his wife  – Angel Coulby, tousled and friendly in palazzo pants – makes the play’s two hours zing, eliciting from us “Ouch!-es”  “Aaahs” and rueful “Oh yes…” moments.

Passages in the second act  are reminiscent of Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park in their mischievous use of social shock – about race, sex, poverty and lies.  As Margie torments Mike (Lloyd Owen)  sometimes deservedly, sometimes not,  he writhes and withers and finally turns nasty.

There are some fine jokes:  about the middle-class word “comfortable”,  the cheeseboard (“Creamy-dippy, body odour, or mouldy basement?”)And as the temperature rises,  an elegantly crafted series of twists and revelations.  It deserves a transfer, and Imelda Staunton another Olivier.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com  to 5 April

rating:  five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GOOD PEOPLE Hampstead Theatre, NW3

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

March 4, 2014 · 11:55 pm

A TALE OF TWO CITIES Royal & Derngate, Northampton

TWO CITIES,  FIVE STARS, ONE THRILLING EVENING

With an elegance which bodes well for James Dacre’s captaincy of  this lovely theatre,  its filmhouse programmed  The Invisible Woman  just as Dacre opened this masterly version  of a novel Dickens wrote during his affair with the woman on whom he may have based its Lucie Manette.  Nice co-ordination, and a chance to reflect on the personal confusions which prevent Dickens from ever giving any of his young women the ripe strong character he bestows on men, and on ladies too old to trouble his desires.

But thrilling to the book at ten years old,  I knew that the real female role was Madame Defarge:  knitting under the guillotine, drunk on death, snarling  “Old debts must be paid”.  With glancing but unmistakeable significance,  Mairead McKinley plays her Irish.  I also knew that my hero was not the stiff idealistic Charles Darnay but his double: ramshackle, boozy self-hating Sydney Carton.  Not just because of his final act,  but because for all the romance and danger the story stands or falls with this  “disappointed drudge…dissolute, cold, reckless”.  Here, played by the magnetic Oliver Dimsdale against Joshua Silver’s buttoned-up Darnay ,  Carton not only stands but strides.

The two men are convincingly near-doubles:  clear handsome features, black brows, one ruffled and one smooth.  Indeed despite much doubling all the casting is sharp: Christopher Hunter disdainfully OTT as the old Marquis, Sean Murray wonderfully seedy as Barsad,  Ignatius Anthony an unusually rounded Defarge, and Michael Mears unexpectedly moving as Mr Lorry the anxious, benign banker.   Dacre’s direction is vigorous,   integrated with a lovely score by Rachel Portman: the community cast make a  flaming, murderous Paris mob and Mike Britton’s set frames the action in leprous ancient walls, as if ghosts from the “best of times, worst of times” were haunting them,remembering.   Once the calm backcloth of London’s rural edges parts suddenly to show the Paris gallows. And the first and last sight of the guillotine is memorable.

So, wonderful theatre: and worth saying how much we owe to Mike Poulton’s skill as adaptor.   Once again (as with Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, not to mention Morte d’Arthur)  he refines dense fiction into clear drama; he knows which lines and moments must be preserved intact, while firmly nudging others into cleaner dramatic shape.  So he omits the flashback dissolution of old Manette,  but makes space for sudden quietnesses:  Lorry  remembering childhood,  a dreamlike wedding song,  and Carton telling Lucie “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul”.   Time passes smooth and neatly, without undue exposition but always with clarity.

And by pointing up the politics, the fantaticism, the ambiguous loyalties and the benign blackmail of Barsad, he made me notice for the first time that in this novel at least Dickens is a direct ancestor of John le Carré.  Darnay’s London trial as a spy, tense beneath the clerk Carton’s dry ironic gaze,  is contrasted with the ranting brutality of the Paris tribunal.  Which evokes, even better than the novel,  the way that fanatical revolutions blend street savagery with jargon-heavy legalistic bureaucracy.    “It is forbidden to weep for an enemy of the people” snarls Madame Defarge.  There are countries where it still is.

box office  01604 624811 to 15  March

rating;  five5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on A TALE OF TWO CITIES Royal & Derngate, Northampton

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 25, 2014 · 11:25 pm

THE FULL MONTY Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

MORE THAN A MOVIE:  SOMETHING SPECIAL FROM SHEFFIELD

The opening is dramatic: a  small gap in the rusty corrugated curtain reveals showers of sparks, a glimpse of steelworks magnificence. It closes, to the soundbite  “The lady’s not for turning”, and the whole frame reopens to reveal the gloomy  magnificence of industrial dereliction,  as Gaz and Dave and the child Nathan make their way into the old mill to nick a girder.   And to create more instant drama by getting their old friend the giant crane (“Margaret the Blue Bitch”)  working, with spectacular unreliability. And we’re hooked too.

That single mill set, fabulously realized by Robert Jones,  looms over every scene – jobcentre, Conservative club, working men’s club, street – as if to affirm the overarching trauma of steel towns in the ‘80s, when the works wound down and stranded men who thought their skilled jobs were for life.     Sometimes, poignantly,  you glimpse the lights of Sheffield beyond and below the far door.

There are always qualms about the West End adapting hit films: wavering confidence drives producers towards  easy ‘bankers’, and in the process can weaken or coarsen them (I can’t be alone in having shuddered at the crass Billy Elliott curtain-call with policemen and miners in tutus).   Here, though, the reverse is true.  Simon Beaufoy rewrites his screenplay for the stage with careful delicacy, and Daniel Evans’ production (down from Sheffield Lyceum)  creates something even  funnier, truer and sadder than the film: as sharp and shining as the city’s steel itself.

Kenny Doughty is a terrific lead as Gaz, amiable jack-the-lad driven by a desperation to keep contact with his son (a splendid,  shared, child role culminating in a bracing bit of ten-year-old sweariness).  Roger Morlidge as fat Dave is intensely touching,  and Craig Gazey ideal as the suicidal, closeted Lomper (he’s champion at  eccentric realism: he was Most Promising Newcomer as Graeme the window-cleaner in Coronation Street).  But all of them are finely, sharply real:  notably Sidney Cole a great mover as Horse, and Simon Rouse a senatorially exasperated Gerald.  Among the smaller but significant women’s roles, Rachel Lumberg is a joy as Dave’s frustrated wife Jean.

The marvel of Beaufoy’s script and Evans’ pacing is the extraordinary surefootedness with which it moves – often within half a line – from dry or hilarious comedy to wrenching pathos.   As a tale of jobless  men putting on a strip show (“All that twizzling-about bollocks” grumps Dave),  it has superb set-pieces and jokes.  Yet without flippancy it embraces the grief of bewildered manhood,  body-shame,  loneliness alleviated by ill-assorted comradeship, and male terror of impotence either sexual, financial or parental.  That it ends in a one-night triumph for “The Bums Of Steel” makes it a fairytale of sorts, but one rooted deep in the reality of survival and wholly recognizable Yorkshire cussedness (I married one..).

And ironically, as the vests fly out across the hooting, clapping stalls, thongs are waved aloft for the full Monty and assorted buttocks gleam under the lights,  I had a sense of having seen something with a spirit unusually and beautifully decent.

box office 0844 482 5141  to 14 June

rating:  five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE FULL MONTY Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 23, 2014 · 12:56 am

JANE EYRE – in two parts – Bristol Old Vic

PASSIONATE,  INTENSE AND WILD:  JANE EYRE REBORN  

“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me!”.    As if in answer to Jane’s cry of defiance Sally Cookson’s  spare, thrilling, physically expressive production frees Charlotte Bronte from the fusty old netting of Mills-and-Boonery which marks even the best screen adaptations.   Madeleine Worrall has a tough striding attractiveness, not misty glamour:   the skeletal ladders and frames where the cast run and climb and gallop free the emotion of the story from period chintziness.  Empty windowframes high aloft, or held up by the cast to fling open or close in on Jane are a powerful economical metaphor: her inward thoughts are sometimes spoken by a protean ensemble.  Pure theatre, passionate not pretentious, sweeps aside cobwebs and uncovers the hot smouldering core of the story.

There are two parts (see both!),  a brave decision rooted in determination to convey the early part, the orphan at Mrs Reed’s mercy and the hollow pieties of Lowood school  (imaginative chanting use is made of the Penny Catechism, enjoining the child at bedtime to “thoughts of death”. I remember that, brrr.).    It gives proper weight to incidentals like the trammelled kindness of the maid Bessie,  and above all it respects the plight of poor mad Bertha Rochester.   Brilliantly, she is played by that tremendous mezzo Melanie Marshall,  wandering around singing at key moments all through.  She has a recurring, haunting folksong of orphanhood, a tremendous Kyrie,  and a moody “Mad about the Boy” speaking for both Bertha and Jane.   Sly, that: indeed there always was more than a touch of cad-about-the-boy in Rochester’s masterful insolence.   And Bertha’s unforgettable rendering of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” at the fiery climax is overwhelming in its pity and savagery.

The doubling and trebling of parts by the ensemble weaves new meanings and ambiguities into the well-worn tale:  dialogue is sparse and finely judged with an extraordinary amount being conveyed by movement  and by Benji Bowers’  haunting score, from folk to cabaret to echoes of Elgar and Britten .  But when Bronte’s words are spoken they find fresh power:  the scene in the second part when Rochester (Felix Hayes)  declares himself to a sceptical Jane is as stroppy and defiant as it should be.   There is some humour – not least Craig Edwards’ occasional metamorphoses into Pilot the dog,  Laura Elphinstone’s careering dangerously around on the set’s walkways as Adela,  and Rochester’s petulant “I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative tonight”.

But mostly it is intense storytelling, movement blurringly fast or dreamlike in slowness.  It calls up  the older, darker folktale awareness which always underlies the Brontes‘ work:  a touch of Bluebeard, of faery,  a pre-Christian passion and danger.  The quality which makes Jane so pleasingly resistant to the missionary earnestness of St John Rivers and his immortal “You were framed for labour, not for love, I claim you for the Lord’s service”.   Altogether, this extraordinary interpretation arouses feelings long forgotten:  the impact of first reading the book,  a childlike resentment of injustice and inchoate sense of romance, the terror of madness and nightmare and the secret conviction that the individual must and will endure.   It is a wonderful production.  Reader, I’d marry it.

box office  0117 987 7877   to  29 March

Rating:  five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on JANE EYRE – in two parts – Bristol Old Vic

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 20, 2014 · 3:30 pm

TRANSLATIONS Crucible, Sheffield

OLD IRELAND: PLAYFUL, POWERFUL, INTENSE AND TRAGIC

A hot summer at harvest’s end,  1836.  Outside a stone barn in County Donegal   old Jimmy-Jack is chortling naughtily over the Iliad.   “Isn’t she the tight one! The flashing-eyed Athene…if you had a woman like that about the house it’s not stripping a turf bog you’d be about!”.   Lame-legged Manus,  waiting for his Dad Hugh to sober up and take over the Ballybeg hedge-school,  helps with the hard words, clutching the precious Aeschylus and Virgil volumes he bought with the money from a hand-raised lamb.  The cheerful dunce Doalty struggles with times tables, and  young women weary and blistered from the fields vie with one another to construe and dig out word-roots.

They’re all, we understand, talking and learning in the Irish language,  any change to English indicated with skilful brilliance by Brian Friel’s phraseology.   For  times are changing,  and under British rule the new National Schools must teach in English.  And the redcoats  – needing interpreters – are out mapping the land and giving familiar landmarks new names.  Friel’s modern classic is based on a reality which now seems startling: village teachers did teach the Classics,  and the colonial masters did – as they always do – fear and mistrust local language.

The story unfolds – at first playful and humorous, later darkening – as  a young soldier (James Northcote) falls for the pretty Maire with disastrous results.  It leads us  on an emotional and phlosophical journey into an unfamiliar world, yet one touching great epic themes:  the politics of language and of power,  misapprehension and mistranslation,  the need for fantasy and legend and the danger of confining something ancient and organic in a tight new linguistic and cultural straitjacket (ask any aboriginal Australian).

James Grieve’s production has sly delights: the barn dance where the soldier can’t follow the ancient skipping pattern of the villagers,  the distant fiddles and chirping birds,  the great battered barn itself (Lucy Osborne’s design).   His cast is full of treasures too:  Niall Buggy as the old teacher and John Conroy as JImmy-Jack, scruffy under his straw hat, chuckling over Mediterranean texts which feel closer than the strictnesses of the cold Victorian island next door.    Beth Cooke is a touchingly  tough rustic Maire, longing for a wider world,  Ciaran O”Brien a gallant hopeful Manus.   And as his more sophisticated brother Owen,  Cian Barry shows the conflicts of a man who collaborates with the soldiers and the new era until their power is seen as not just maps and words,  but cold threats to shoot livestock and flatten homes if nobody betrays the rebels on the mountain.

In a haunting late moment Bridget, who fears the strange sweet smell of potato blight, confuses it with another ominous smell, foretelling a century of conflict:  the burning canvas tents of the military.   Friel’s tremendous play,  this well served, haunts you long after you get home.

box office  0114 249 6000    to 8 March.
TOURING  to 3 May:  tour details http://www.ett.org.uk

rating:  five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on TRANSLATIONS Crucible, Sheffield

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

February 14, 2014 · 6:40 pm

RED VELVET: REPRISE Tricycle Theatre NW6

IN WHICH A GOOD PLAY MOVES TOWARDS SOMETHING GREATER

Sometimes, memories need to be revisited.   It was in autumn 2012 that I reviewed Lolita Chakrabarti’s play starring her husband Adrian Lester  (my Times review, paywalled, is on http://tinyurl.com/nbfj6dl).   I liked it, as everyone else did;   was please to be one of those who voted both Chakrabarti and Lester their awards at the Critics’ Circle.   I called it “sharp and entertaining”, and was delighted by the tribute to a largely forgotten theatre hero:  Ira Aldridge,  a black American actor who in the 1830’s,  even before slavery was anned ,replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as  Othello at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden.  For two nights the “negro” strangled the milk-white Desdemona onstage before shocked, racist Victorian opinion stopped him.

I loved Lester’s performance – who wouldn’t? –  and enjoyed the secondary theme – amusingly illustrated –  of how acting was moving from Kean’s declamatory,  stylized style towards more naturalistic and passionate performances.  Thinking back,  I remembered those things, and also moment when an embarrassed cast suddenly realize that the manager has bravely cast a replacement who is – gasp! – black.    I appreciated, too, the slyly feminist device of book-ending of the play with a scene in Poland as a young woman reporter,  herself underrated and patronized,  inveigles herself in to interview the aged actor  whose successes across Europe never quite wiped out the memory of humiliation in London.    I remembered the final scene when we see with a jolt that even this victory has required him, nightly,  to “white-up” grotesquely with panstick to play King Lear,  and the apposite rage of his final  “I’ll not weep!” and threat of “the terrors of the earth”.

But I sneaked back to see it again this week,  wondering how it feels on the far side of Adrian Lester’s stunning and thoroughly modern Othello at the National Theatre.    And I found that as sometimes happens  the play has grown bigger: stronger, more remarkable, finding deeper feeling in the deep red velvet folds of bygone theatricalia.    There is now a more shocking magic in Aldridge’s deep, dark dignity and bitter banked-down rage; more charm and mischief of his lighter moments and the edgy intelligence of his discussions with his co-star,   as Desdemona moves towards his physical style and embraces a freer transatlantic school  of acting. There’s real  brilliance as the two meld stylized  1830s mannerisms with real emotion in the terrifying handkerchief scene which closes  the first half.  And there’s fascination – for us theatre anoraks – in comparing it with Lester’s interaction last year with his modern Desdemona, Olivia Vinall…

I had also quite forgotten the power and misery of Aldridge’s row with the manager , LaPorte, and the author’s generosity in letting LaPorte express the frustration of those who, faced with a moral choice,   want to keep their job rather than be Spartacus.  Indhu Rubasingham’s production is heading for New York. I hope it comes back.  Meanwhile, friends, look out for returns and note that as I write there are three matinees not quite sold out yet…

http://www.tricycle.co.uk   to 15 March
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on RED VELVET: REPRISE Tricycle Theatre NW6

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as